At least 58 camps and tent cities have been built around the town with more are on the way. Now, the town’s inhabitants, refugee camps, schools and clinics are groaning under the weight of the newest influx, and thousands more Syrians are soon expected. The town of Arsal, which had a population of 45,000 mostly Lebanese before the conflict, is now also an ad hoc home to more than 65,000 Syrians who have arrived since the civil war erupted three-years ago.Īrsal ‘ s mayor said more than 4,000 families arrived in just the past week, most from the nearby city of Yabroud, where fighting is intense and Khaled was wounded. Some patients are sleeping on stretchers,” he told Al Jazeera. Qasem al-Zein, a medical doctor from Qusair, heads the only clinic in the Lebanese town, a bare-bones facility set up by Syrian refugee doctors and funded by donors. Most of the civilians who fled these towns are also living in Arsal now. The government has already seized the towns of Qara, Deir Attiya and Nabak, to the northeast of Yabroud, along the strategically important highway linking Damascus with the city of Homs.
Outside Khaled’s room, the medical staff – mostly Syrian refugees from the border town of Qusair – scramble to treat another rush of patients entering Arsal, 125 kilometres northeast of Lebanon’s capital Beirut.ĭozens of wounded civilians and rebels have been brought across the border to Arsal in the past week, after Syrian forces stepped up their aerial and artillery barrage of Yabroud and the surrounding Qalamoun region, ahead of an expected all-out assault on the rebel-held town. Some patients are sleeping on stretchers.īy - Dr Qasem al-Zein, describing his overstretched clinic in Arsal
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