In the wake of the Assad government’s fall in December 2024, I travelled to Syria in April 2025 to hear directly about the challenges the country was facing, further compounded by a devastating collapse in humanitarian aid. Among the places I visited was Serekaniye Camp near Al-Hasakeh city, which serves as the roughest of accommodations for thousands of people who fled their homes in northern Syria due to Turkish military attacks in 2019.
There, families live in small cinderblock rooms or tents without adequate medical care, sanitation, education, or other essential services. And, just before my visit, drastic cuts in U.S. aid programs had resulted in a nearly complete cutoff of outside assistance. Despite these dire conditions, no one I spoke to would consider returning to their homes, which are in areas still controlled by Turkey.
In September, I met with people who had fled their homes in Syria earlier this year for various areas in Lebanon. In fact, while the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates approximately 360,000 Syrians have returned home from Lebanon since the fall of the Assad government, it also estimates approximately 105,000 people have fled in the opposite direction during that period – from Syria to Lebanon.
In the small villages of Massoudieh and Haissa in northern Lebanon, a stone’s throw from the Syrian border, we met with members of Syria’s Alawite community. Forces aligned with the new Syrian government committed large-scale massacres of Alawites on Syria’s coast in March. Now, there are thousands of Alawite refugees in Lebanon.
The terrible similarities in the living conditions of people in Serekaniye Camp and those in Massoudieh and Haissa were striking. In Massoudieh, people live in an abandoned school with one toilet and a spigot that serves as a shower for over 30 people on each floor. A refugee who is an electrical engineer by trade took me outside the back of the building. He explained that people had built cinderblock rooms on what had been a basketball court. With corrugated tin roofs, these structures were like ovens in the summer, but the electrical current won’t be strong enough to run even space heaters as the weather turns.
In Haissa, 764 people have fashioned a camp in and around a mosque. Some have put up tents, quite literally, in an adjoining graveyard. Flies swarm constantly. A community leader told us that there have been several suicide attempts.
Echoing those in Serekaniye Camp, people in Massoudieh and Haissan said they would not return home unless a legitimate form of international protection is provided – something that is difficult to imagine happening.
The collapse of U.S. and international aid has made this crisis in Lebanon exponentially worse. UNHCR, facing severe budget cuts due to the withdrawal of U.S. and allied funding, is no longer able to provide sufficient assistance to newly arrived Syrian refugees. The people I met — hungry, tired, and sick — are among the tens of thousands paying the price for policy decisions made thousands of miles away.
Washington has expressed support for Syria’s new government, citing a desire for stability. But there can be no stability while hundreds of thousands of Syrians remain in squalid camps and informal settlements inside and outside the country, unable to return home. And unless and until conditions allow for safe and voluntary returns, it does nothing for stability to let people live in foul conditions that could be ameliorated with relatively small sums.
Even for those in the U.S. who feel detached from children sleeping in graveyards or trying to study in abandoned schools, aid cuts make no strategic sense. They undermine regional allies like Lebanon and foster the very instability the U.S. claims to want to prevent. More importantly, allowing Syrians who are internally displaced or refugees to languish when relief is within reach is not only shortsighted — it is morally indefensible.
