‘Huge returns’ draw smugglers to rugged Syria-Lebanon border

South of the Syrian village of Zita, armed personnel take up position on a berm next to an abandoned red and cream coloured house.

In this rugged corner of western Syria, security forces have, in the past month, ambushed smugglers attempting an illegal trade of weapons into Lebanon. Beyond a rocky mud track and orchards, a mosque stands inside the neighbouring country a few hundred metres away.

A senior security official showed The National how forces ambushed smugglers from a nearby low grey building, intercepting a cache of weapons stashed in the red and cream house as middlemen did their work.

It was one of many raids and grabs on weapons and drugs in this remote border area over the past year, where human life is sparse and the hollow walls of abandoned, bombed-out homes ring with silence.

Beefed-up patrols, route closures, and financial penalties for less egregious offences have helped security forces tackle smuggling attempts, Mohammed Al Qudsi, security directorate chief for the Al Qusayr area, told The National. Levelling out fuel prices with Lebanon to reduce incentives for refined oil product contraband have also helped.

“With the use of force in some cases, these factors ultimately led to the cessation of smuggling and the control of the border to a degree of more than 90 per cent,” he said.

But, motivated by money, traders in illegal drugs and weapons are still trying to cross this porous border. There have been fatal clashes in the area this year as security forces crack down on smugglers.

"Their [smugglers’] activities are still continuing because of the huge returns,” Mr Qudsi told The National.

Security forces ambushed smugglers who were trying to take contraband weapons into Lebanon from this house on the Syrian border. Lizzie Porter / The National

For years, Al Qusayr region, part of Homs province, was used by fighters from the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah as a training and weapons supply base, according to Syrian military and security officials and analysts.

They propped up Bashar Al Assad for more than a decade during the country’s civil war, and fled when rebels from Hayat Tahrir Al Sham drove him from power and out of Damascus last December.

The National was the first foreign media to visit Al Qusayr days after the fall of the regime last year. Hezbollah fighters left behind weapons training manuals, caches of ammunition and posters of the group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was assassinated last year in an Israeli strike in Beirut.

All that has changed now, and Syria’s army and internal security forces have taken over control of the area.