From Beirut To Babila, Syrian Refugee Family Returns Home

Syrian toddler Luay happily explores his grandfather's modest house near Damascus for the first time. After years as refugees in Lebanon, the three-year-old and his family have returned to their homeland.

Babila/Beirut, Syria, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 19th Oct, 2018 ) :Syrian toddler Luay happily explores his grandfather's modest house near Damascus for the first time. After years as refugees in Lebanon, the three-year-old and his family have returned to their homeland.

They are among several thousand Syrians who have made an emotional journey home from Lebanon, where they sought safety from the war that has ravaged their native country since 2011.

Worn down by tough economic conditions in Lebanon and seeing regime victories back home as bringing stability, they have taken advantage of return trips coordinated by Lebanese and Syrian authorities.

Last month Luay's father Rawad Kurdi, 30, his mother, and his baby sister Luliya decided to make the trip themselves.

As the sun was rising, they lined up with dozens of other refugees to board buses that would whisk them out of Beirut.

With them were more than a dozen suitcases and boxes -- everything they could carry from their five years in Lebanon.

During a nine-hour wait for the buses to move, Rawad was anxious to end his family's long exile.

"This return is definitive. I will never leave Syria again," he told AFP.

In 2012, Rawad and his 35 relatives were forced to flee their hometown of Babila southeast of Damascus after fighting broke out between rebels and government forces.

They came to Lebanon. Three years later, some of the elderly family members including Rawad's father Ahmad returned to Syria, and more have hit the road home since.