Jana Al-Dahibi
02 October 2025
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This investigative report reveals a growth in smuggling activities of multiple forms across the Lebanon-Syria border using illegal crossing points. These points have not been shut down, closed or controlled, even after the fall of the regime of Bashar al-Assad. There has simply been a change in the “players” and those controlling the crossings, especially on the Syrian side. To prepare this report we conducted field trips and gathered testimonies from those involved
A decade on from when they were forcibly displaced, the people of the Syrian town of Al-Qusayr returned to find their homes in ruins or scarred by the fighting. In addition to the physical destruction, they were shocked to find a network of secret tunnels and hidden weapons caches. This revealed another aspect of how the conflict has affected the city.
In June 2013, Al-Qusayr was the setting for a bloody confrontation between armed factions and the Syrian regime army, backed by Hezbollah militia. The battle ended with the army and Hezbollah taking control of the city, expelling its people and turning it into a closed military stronghold.
Even after the regime of Bashar al-Assad fell in December 2024, military and economic networks continued to maintain their grip on the region. Illegal crossings along the Syria-Lebanon border remained active, albeit with new faces in control. The political upheaval has not affected the roots of this system of smuggling through illegal crossings, which is maintained due to a combination of factors, including lack of oversight and an alliance of interest between smugglers and influential forces.
Source: AFP
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A.S., a man living in Al-Qusayr, says that the city is “more than 85 percent destroyed, with most of its basic facilities dysfunctional.” The most striking thing he told us was that, after Hezbollah withdrew from the city, the people found its weapons caches in places like Wadi Hanna.
The most prominent figure on the scene today is a man known as Abu Talha, who claims to be part of the new Syrian administration’s public security team, and facilitates smuggling, particularly of weapons. He holds dual Lebanese and Syrian nationalities and comes from the border area around Jousiya, one of the five main crossings between Syria and the Lebanese village of AL-Qa’a.
According to A.S., Abu Talha’s activities go beyond gun running and include smuggling of diesel oil, scrap metal, and basic items that are in short supply in Syria. He also works on building alliances with influential clans and parties on both sides of the border to consolidate his control over the smuggling network.
In the remote villages of Wadi Khaled, where the border between Lebanon and Syria runs through rugged mountainous terrain, many people are engaged in smuggling. Among them, we met Abu Ahmad and Riad Khalil, who areborn in the area and became involved in a world that recognises no political borders.
Abu Ahmad (not his real name), a man in his forties, had no plan to become part of a complex smuggling network. He worked for a humanitarian organization for five years, earning $600 a month. Suddenly, the organization stopped operating in his area. “I looked around for work, but it was no good,” he says. He turned to smuggling solar panels, medical equipment, and food from Beirut and Tripoli to Homs and Damascus, and then moved on to human trafficking. “I’d get calls from Syrian families wanting to cross the border, so I’d make the arrangements with intermediaries on both sides,” says Abu Ahmad.
Riad Khalil, on the other hand, sees working in smuggling as an inevitable commercial enterprise in these border areas. He graduated from university in 2011, but his degree gave him no way out from unemployment. “I don’t love smuggling,” he says.
We headed to the Wadi Khaled region, which is made up of 23 villages administered by nine municipalities and 26 mayors, and is represented by two members in the Lebanese parliament, according to Sheikh Ahmad, mayor of Amayer.
For over a decade, Wadi Khaled has been a hub for various kinds of smuggling and a place of refuge for tens of thousands of Syrians fleeing to Lebanon through illegal land crossings, in search of safety from the war that broke out in Syria in 2011.
Wadi Khaled is just one link in a chain along the 375-kilometer Lebanon-Syria border, where hills and valleys have become “non-permanent crossing points.” When we travelled there in September 2024 (three months before Assad’s fall), we discovered many details and secrets.
In the village of Munjez there is a blue sign saying, “Road to Homs” and an abandoned building with the words “Departure hall for Syria,” both of which bear witness to a time when borders were nothing more than imaginary lines on the ground.
Chadra is the last Lebanese army checkpoint, where IDs are carefully examined. After that there are no more checks.
Noura al-Tahta is a border village under the same hill which overlooks the Syrian town of Talkalakh. Here we filmed men and women secretly crossing the valley with the help of a “guide.”
Munjez, meanwhile, echoes to the sound of lorries going back and forth to Syria, while the stench of spilled diesel fills the air.
These lorries, used for smuggling, pull in regularly. They are one of the instruments in the toolbox of the smugglers.
Here we met Mohammed Ahmad al-Qasi, a young man from Aboudieh. He says that smuggling is part of his daily routine, along with the whizzing of bullets as the Lebanese army chases smugglers.
In the border village of Amayer in Wadi Khalid, the families and homes of those with Lebanese or Syrian nationalities intermingle, and the whole concept of “borders” is meaningless. Motorbikes take goods from village to village, and young people cross the mountains as easily as one would wander through a market. The clans control things according to their own rules, taking no account of borders and seeing them as natural crossing points for trade and social relations.
In an interview with Sheikh Ahmad, mayor of Amayer and one of the elders of the Arab al-Atiq clan, he refused to describe this border activity as “smuggling.” He said: “I’ve got relatives in neighbouring Syrian villages. The only difference is I’ve got Lebanese nationality and they’ve got Syrian. Our relationship is based on marriage ties, friendship, and trade. These interconnections of geography and demographics make it hard for any country to stop the smuggling of goods.”
According to Sheikh Ahmad, the economy of these villages depends on illegal trade – a term he prefers to smuggling. He argues that this cross-border activity prevents young people from becoming delinquents, and that working in smuggling stops them from stealing or drug addiction.
“Smuggling is a young person’s work. They may be university graduates, or former members of the army or security forces who left their jobs and turned to smuggling,” he says.
All along Lebanon’s 450-kilometre border with Israel and Syria – from Naqoura in the south to Arida in the north – the Lebanese army faces a complex geopolitical problem. The rugged mountainous terrain makes border control akin to “fighting against the wind.” The border runs through areas like Rmeish, Maroun al-Ras, Rachaya El Wadi, Masnaa, Arsal, Al-Qaa, and Hermel, where the terrain is helpful for smugglers.
According to official army data, the whole length of the 340km north-eastern border with Syria is covered by specialist military units backed by advanced surveillance equipment.
These troops are stationed along Lebanon’s northern border (from Arida to Wadi Khaled) and on its eastern border (from Hermel to Mount Hermon).
The Lebanese army emailed us a response to some of our questions about smuggling through illegal land crossings between Lebanon and Syria. They also gave us a collection of videos documenting the arrest of Syrians trying to cross into Lebanon, with the help of smugglers, using dangerous methods. Some of these videos were shocking. They showed people sleeping in the back of lorries or on the engine, some even in fuel tanks.
Smuggling of Syrians through illegal crossings has gone up since 2015, according to the Lebanese army.
On April 15, 2019, Lebanon’s Supreme Defence Council authorized the General Security Directorate (GDGS) to deport any Syrians entering Lebanon illegally. This was followed by an executive decision by the GDGS on May 13, 2019. The Lebanese army said in a statement that deteriorating economic conditions in Syria had led to a new wave of displaced Syrians heading for Lebanon.
Source: The Lebanese Army
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Over the last ten years, there has been talk of over 130 illegal land crossing points between Lebanon and Syria. A Lebanese army source, however, said that the whole border is really one single crossing point, with hundreds of shifting locations for smuggling operations.
This source says that, in the Bekaa region, there are about 53 crossing points, with a larger number in the north.They are monitored by Lebanese army towers, observation points and checkpoints.
According to this source, the 12 main crossings which have already been shut down by the Lebanese army between the north and the Bekaa, include Al-Kniseh, Qarha, Abidan, Wawiyat, Amiri, and Hajj Issa in the Bekaa; and the crossings at Qasif Abu Bakr, Hassan Nimer Nassar al-Din, Manjed al-Haq, Haydar Makhbir Nasser al-Din, Rakan al-Haj Hassan Bridge, and Muhammad Shafiq al-Haj Hassan.
But Sheikh Ahmad, mayor of Amayer, says that there are crossing points with no Lebanese security presence. The seven chief irregular mountain crossings are the “oil pipeline,” the “western bridge,” Abu Juhash, Abidan, Awishat, Maajir, Wadi al-Wawiyat, and Qarha.
The smuggling of migrants into Lebanon is an issue that highlights problems in the performance of the judiciary and the limits of its role, particularly over the sentencing of smugglers operating along the Lebanon-Syria border, despite their small numbers compared to the scale of the activity. Article 668 of the Lebanese Penal Code (referred to locally as “migrant fraud”) is the only legal reference used in cases of irregular immigration. This article does not cover all the complexities of the phenomenon. It deals with it from a narrow perspective without considering its complexity.
The Lebanese judiciary treats cases of irregular migration as “human trafficking offences,” even though there are no clear legal provisions that make it a criminal offence. To classify a case as human trafficking, the court requires three conditions: use of unlawful means, intent to exploit, and actual exploitation. In reality, however, these criteria are not applied consistently. If the court rules that the act is “human trafficking,” the punishment should at least five years’ imprisonment for a criminal offence. But some sentences passed have been for jail terms ranging from just three months to three years, for the “offence of entering the country covertly.”
Former Lebanese Minister of Justice Henri Khoury, in a video interview in late August 2024 (while he was still in office), dismissed accusations that the judiciary had been too lenient in its sentencing, stressing the need to speed up trials.
Figures he provided show that processing of detainees in Beirut during May and June 2024 was as follows:
May: 112 detainees were brought to court, while 128 were not
June: The number of detainees dealt with rose to 153, while 138 were not brought before the court
For Khoury, the main obstacle to cracking down on the smugglers is that the security forces, who are responsible for bringing them to court, are too slow in doing so.
Throughout Assad’s rule, the Syrian army’s Fourth Division, led by Maher al-Assad, was primarily responsible for the lack of control on the Lebanese-Syrian border and for facilitating the activities of smuggling networks in exchange for “taxes and kickbacks.”
Information we gathered during our investigation shows that middlemen and smugglers in Syria would collect people at specific locations ready to be transported. There, drivers would sort out their status with soldiers from the Fourth Division in exchange for bribes to facilitate their crossing the border.
A Lebanese security source, who preferred to remain anonymous, says that, throughout the rule of the former Syrian regime, smuggling spread all along the Lebanese border, from the western Bekaa to the eastern mountains, including Arsal, Al-Qaa and Hermel, reaching as far as Akkar and Arida.
In all these areas “there was smuggling, including drugs and particularly Captagon. Factories spread along the border, because they were hard to reach. In Lebanon, there were only a few small factories.”
In Syria, by contrast, there were large factories able to produce millions of tablets a day.
According to this source, the Fourth Division of the former Syrian army “was an enabler of the trade in drugs, and there were factories on the Lebanese-Syrian border, such as the famous plant belonging to Hassan Daqqou, who is connected to many figures inside Lebanon.”
Hassan Daqqou, who holds dual Lebanese and Syrian nationality and is known as the “Captagon King,” was investigated by the Lebanese intelligence in April 2021.
A source in the Lebanese judiciary – a young man in his thirties familiar with the Daqqou investigation – told us that “he has a factory for producing Captagon in the eastern mountains near Maaraboun (in Baalbek).”
Part of his factory is located in Syria and the other part in Lebanon, making it difficult for the Lebanese security services to gain access.
The immediate reason for Daqqou’s arrest “was not because of drugs, but because he bought 250 old Lebanese army uniforms to be delivered to specific people… that led to his arrest.”
The fall of the Syrian regime highlighted another well-known feature of smuggling on the Lebanon-Syria border. Investigating this was, however, made extremely difficult by political interference and Hezbollah’s control over large parts of the border, which it uses to smuggle weapons from Iran to Lebanon through Syria. The Syrian city of Al-Qusayr was the “heart of the mystery.”
In a further sign of the importance of Al-Qusayr, the city was hit several times by air strikes, in the course of the latest Israeli war on Lebanon (2023-2024). The target was Hezbollah’s warehouses and weapons, as Israel’s military declared on several occasions.
Weeks after the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, a remarkable event took place on the Lebanon-Syria border. The new Syrian administration foiled a bid to smuggle a large batch of weapons and missiles into Lebanon through illegal crossings.
This incident was indicative of a long history of arms smuggling operations along the north-eastern border between Lebanon and Syria.
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Early February 2025
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Al-Qusayr is separated from the border with Lebanon by around15 kilometres of flat plains and provides a link between northern Lebanon and the area south of Homs.
This area has been and continues to be a center for arms smuggling, especially following the outbreak of the war in Syria in 2011, which made it a key strategic gateway for the war.
According to Munir al-Rabih, editor-in-chief of the online newspaper Al-Modon, open smuggling along the Lebanon-Syria border has been condoned since before Hafez al-Assad, right through the Syrian war and up to the present day.
He says that the outbreak of the Syrian revolution, however, and Hezbollah’s taking control, caused “complete dissolution of the border” as well as the disappearance of all existing security controls between Lebanon and Syria, and the opening of new roads and crossing points.
“Some of these roads and crossings then became official ones, and Hezbollah’s geographical, political and military duplicity of control led to the border being opened up completely, allowing various forms of smuggling to flourish.”
“Later on, the whole Lebanon-Syria border area was turned into a global factory for making, smuggling, and trafficking ofdrugs,” he said.
The former head of Lebanon’s military court, Munir Shehadeh, handled many cases involving smuggling and the smuggling networks between Lebanon and Syria: “The section of the border from the Shebaa Farms to Masnaa are under Israeli control, so smuggling there has come to an end. But from Masnaa towards the north, it still goes on, because of the unstable situation in Syria. Also, the disbanding of the old security forces and the formation of new ones in Syria has exacerbated the smuggling activities of gangs claiming allegiance to various factions, like Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham.”
The Assad regime made political and security gains from the decades of lawlessness on the border with Lebanon.
Al-Modon editor Munir al-Rabih says: “The main purpose was to smuggle weapons to Hezbollah, and these areas were a key strategic supply line for the party. And for this, anything was permitted. Hezbollah benefited financially and economically, and so did others working for it, by smuggling weapons.”
Brigadier General Shehadeh argues, however, that Hezbollah does not depend on illegal crossings for its smuggled weapons, but the militia uses other routes. “Israel has more than once bombed illegal crossings in the mountains between Lebanon and Syria, but it has not closed down Hezbollah’s weapons smuggling routes.”
The Al-Qusayr region, which was under Hezbollah control before the fall of Assad, is now under that of the new Syrian administration.
Shehada adds: “Hezbollah resistance group doesn’t need individual weapons like Kalashnikovs and rifles. Arms smuggling for Hezbollah needs to involve something of value, like ballistic missiles, drones, and equipment to make weapons … not just sending people across remote valleys for rifles that are of no value at all.”
We contacted the new Syrian administration for comment on our investigation and on its role in controlling the Syria-Lebanon border, but up to the date this report is published we have received no response.
