Qasr: A Town of Two Countries
When we ask Muhammad Qataya – known as “Zaim” [leader] in his town, Qasr, and in Hermel – when his house obtained electricity, his wife responds with another question: “Do you mean Syrian or Lebanese electricity?”. Qataya’s house is in the Munqatia [disconnected] neighborhood, which is approximately 50 meters away from the bridge over the small canal that marks the Lebanese-Syrian border in the town. A year and a half ago, Lebanese electricity poles reached the edge of the canal on the Lebanese side. The electricity company installed his and his neighbors’ meters on the poles. “We can’t put them on your houses because you’re inside Syrian territory”, the employee told them before drawing power lines from the meters on the poles to their houses.
A hundred meters down from Qataya’s home, on the bank of the canal that carries water from the Orontes River to the Syrian Maayan Dam on the border of the towns Matraba and Qasr, is a Syrian army border checkpoint. The Syrian state told them, “You’re above the checkpoint, so we can’t supply you with Syrian electricity”. This duality in powers between the Lebanese and Syrian states benefited Qataya as he did not have to obtain a permit to build his house or dig an artesian well: “Nobody asked any questions”. He lives there on so-called “shady” land, outside the authority of either state.
Qataya is not the only person to benefit from this situation. Qasr residents have constructed approximately 200 houses along its Syrian border. Qasr itself would barely identify itself as Lebanese had the Sykes-Picot Agreement not plotted it on the Lebanese map. The agreement introduced little change in reality except for the gendarmerie station that flies the Lebanese flag – proof of presence in a region that looks east toward Syria in the absence of its custodial mother state. The duality applies to Qasr’s property map itself: “Our town’s head is in Lebanon and its body is in Syria”, says former Qasr municipal mayor Dr. Ali Zuaiter. “Qasr’s houses are built on the rocky ground, whereas most of its agricultural lands flow into Syrian territory”.
National Belonging Only on an ID Card
Qasr consists of three main neighborhoods: Ras al-Qasr, i.e. old Qasr; Ras al-Naba, named after Syria’s Naba’ al-Munqatia (Munqatia Spring) and containing Qasr’s square; and Dalik, on the Syrian border. Qasr’s expansion witnessed the creation of the northern neighborhood built on the level ground previously owned by the Obeid family, which completely vacated the region after problems occurred between it and the Nasreddine family.
Teacher Muhammad Zuaiter says that Qasr absorbed the clanspeople living in the mountains, as well as Lebanese people coming from Syrian towns. The town was named after “a building from the days of the Romans that the people called al-qasr [the palace]. Later, the Surur family built a house and called it Qasr”. While Zuaiter relates from the elderly that the Ottomans are the ones who registered Qasr’s lands and most lands in the Syrian interior to the pashas and beys more than 150 years ago, the Hamada family say that their grandparents purchased these properties with their money. “If we look to the French land registry in 1930, we find that the Qasr’s inhabitants were few and sometimes owned no more than the room in which they lived and a few meters around it that the Ottomans registered to them, whereas all the land was under the Hamada family’s name”, Zuaiter says. When Syria and Lebanon were divided into two countries, Zuaiter’s grandfather found that his land was now part of Syria, where he lived and bequeathed the land to his descendants.
Qasr lacks a sewage network. There are efforts to establish one connected to the treatment plant planned for the city of Hermel in the land between the two areas. Muhammad Jaafar, a Qasr-Sahlat al-Moi resident, says that Qasr belongs to the Lebanese state “in identity only” as “deprivation envelops everything”. The “medical sector” in the town, which is located 12 kilometers away from Hermel and 160 kilometers away from Beirut, consists only of “a modest Ministry of Social Affairs clinic that you could call pro forma” and another clinic belonging to Hezbollah’s Islamic Health Organization. Anyone who needs a small wound stitched must head to Hermel, says Jaafar: “There is no clinic for an on-call doctor in Qasr.”
Regarding jobs in Qasr, Jaafar says that they are limited to agriculture. He adds, “It’s all loss after loss. A farmer almost has to sell his house to install and fuel an irrigation network. Or he has to raise livestock or buy a pickup truck and take goat manure fertilizer to sell in the south or smuggle foodstuffs and other goods to Syria”.
Qasr has expanded since the end of the 1970s. Most of its people returned during the civil war because it was spared the calamities of that era. It is also true that the town swelled when the Nasreddine clan (which previously had a few houses there) and Jaafar clan descended from their jords [barren hinterlands] to inhabit it. However, Qasr is distinguished from Hermel by its position right on the Syrian border. Hence, border commerce constitutes its most prominent source of livelihood, in addition to its lands extending into the Syrian interior. Syria has long treated Lebanese people from Qasr living in Syrian villages, as well as Qasr residents who farm Syrian lands, as it treats Syrian farmers. They receive support through fertilizers, diesel fuel, agricultural pesticides, and even tractor oils. The Syrian state then collects their wheat and hay yield at discounted prices and leaves the choice of how to dispose of the grain and potato yield up to them.
Between Smuggling and Deprivation
Perhaps no Lebanese person outside of northern Beqaa had heard of the border town of Qasr before the events in Syria in 2011 and the subsequent battle of Qusayr and its countryside. At that time, Qasr became well known amidst the talk about the Lebanese villages on the Syrian side, which are linked to the town demographically because many of their Lebanese residents are registered there, as well as its logistical role in the battles underway.
Qasr’s people tend to call their area a city. In the early 1980s, it contained approximately 1,000 houses. Today, there are 4,000 residential units inhabited by approximately 30,000 people, among them 8,000 voters, according to Muhammad Zuaiter. The townspeople also cite the extension of Qasr’s neighborhoods to the Syrian border in the east and north, Sahlat al-Moi in the direction of the Jaafar family’s jord in the west, and Hermel in the south. Hence, they find the “town” descriptor too small.
Recently, Lebanese were reintroduced to Qasr via the talk about smuggling to Syria, as though it were a new phenomenon. In reality, smuggling has been one of the most important sources of income in the area since the two countries separated. Qasr is one of the areas along the border line extending from Dabousieh and Arida in North Lebanon to Deir el-Aachayer in western Beqaa, passing through Hawsh al-Sayyid Ali, Mushrifah, Aarsal, Ham, Maarboun, Masnaa, and other areas. In these areas, border commerce – as their people prefer to call smuggling – has been active ever since the Sykes–-Picot Agreement drew the current border between the two countries.
In Qasr, many people do work in smuggling, of course. But there are also farmers who toil from sunrise to sunset, living by the sweat of their brow. There are a few teachers and army and gendarmerie personnel. There are Hezbollah full-timers. And there are many powerless people who make ends meet by means difficult for outsiders to imagine given the area’s lack of organizations. They watch the smuggling trucks, tankers, and vans and even the motorcycles that carry “small smuggle loads” consisting of a gas bottle or jerry can, having either decided not to engage in “illegal” activities or failed to break into the “cartel” with a de facto monopoly over smuggling. Like the people of Hermel, they struggle to find a subsidized food product or even a jerry can of petrol or diesel at the subsidized price. In late February 2021 [when USD1 equaled LL9,660], they were paying LL11,000 for a kilo of sugar, LL70,000 for 20 liters of petrol (rather than its LL24,000 price in other parts of Lebanon), and LL40,000 for diesel (rather than LL19,000), while these products are being smuggled into Syria by the ton.
70% of Qasr’s Graduates Were Educated in Syria
Clearly, the people of Qasr do not see the border as a tangible barrier to movement between the two countries. This was especially true before the Syrian revolution broke out in 2011. Consequently, 70% of Qasr’s graduates studied in Syrian universities, and the same percentage of children were attending schools in the villages of Qusayr’s countryside. “We would carry our books across the border, taking Syrian buses and going to their schools”, Dr. Ali Zuaiter says. He continues, “I specialized in general medicine at the University of Damascus”. He then traveled to France, where he completed his specialization in heart disease. Syria requires buses, whether small or large, to transport school students for free, including Lebanese students. The Lebanese state established a public primary school in Qasr in 1963, but many families continued sending their children to Syria at the intermediate and secondary levels. “Education there is free, as are the books and transportation, and the quality of the education is good”, Zuaiter says. Moreover, the Qasr-Sahlat al-Moi secondary school was only established in the latter, which is near Qasr, in 2004.
When you visit Qasr, leaving Hermel – the last Lebanese area, so they say – 12 kilometers behind, you understand Zuaiter’s statement that the town would be dead were it not for Syria. When traveling along the main road that bisects Qasr, where the houses rest on the two banks, you need to move only 100 meters left to be in Syrian territory, and you would still be in the geographical heart of Qasr. The legal crossing (the Syrian Secretariat) on the border with Qaa is approximately 30 kilometers away from Qasr.
Zuaiter laughs when asked about the relationship between Qasr’s people and the Lebanese state. He tells a story: “I finished secondary school in 1981, when I was 19 years old. I saw myself as a tough guy, I was in excellent health, and I had loved the army since I was young. So I decided to apply to the Military Academy to become an army officer”. When he inquired about the paperwork required, he was told, “You need LL45,000 to become an officer”. He returned to Qasr disappointed. He explains, “I went around the 65 houses that made up Qasr and asked, ‘Aren’t we Lebanese?’. They said, ‘Of course – full-blooded’”. He then asked, “Am I unwell or an incompetent student?”. They responded, “Not at all – you’re one of our best youths”. When he told them that he had to pay LL45,000 to enter the academy, they began cursing the officials and this authority that does not consider Hermel and its district, including Qasr, part of its domain. “At that time, a wealthy person barely had LL1,000”, Zuaiter explains. He abandoned his dream and passion for serving the nation, along with all the military clothing his father bought him when he was young, and headed to Damascus, where he enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine. “To this day, the state doesn’t consider us part of it”, he adds.
Land Ownership in Syria
Qasr’s relationship with Syria is not just one of adjacent neighbors. Zuaiter says that much of Qasr’s native population is sprawled across more than 15 villages inside Syrian territory: “For example, my family is originally from Hawik in Syria. I was born there, and I came to Qasr 45 years ago after I was appointed a teacher in the public school”. Besides Hawik, people registered in Qasr are spread across the towns of Safsafah, Zeita, Aqrabiyah, Fadiliya, Blluza, Wadi Hanna, Maayan, Naba Olas, Matraba, Saqraja, Arjoun, Tell al-Nabi Mando, Joubaniye, Nahriyeh, Diyabiyya, and eastern and western Samaqiyat.
Before the events in Syria in 2011, these people’s relationship with Lebanon was limited to voting in election seasons. Some may have headed to Lebanon to study at university or take up a position in a state department, particularly education. After 2011, specifically during the battle of Qusayr and its countryside, Lebanese living in the Syrian villages were displaced to Qasr, Hawsh, Hermel, and its vicinity. Some built homes and others rented, but once life returned to their villages, most went back to their land and jobs. Some, having opened businesses in their Lebanese motherland, are still living between the two countries.
Qataya’s situation differs because he was born and lives in Qasr. However, since his paternal grandfather, his family has – like many others – farmed lands extending into Syria. Most of these lands were owned by the Hamada family in the days of the Ottomans. Later, farmers began purchasing parts of the lands they worked from the Hamada clan. Qataya is one such farmer: “Even the land of my house I bought from House Hamada, as did many farmers from other families”. Qataya says that the change in ownership began in the 1950s. It was bolstered by the vision established by late Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, who said that the land belongs to those who farm it, and then by Syria’s “agricultural reform”, which involved seizing portions of the property of pashas, beys, and major landowners and distributing them to farmers. Thereafter, Syria established the formula that a farmer is entitled to 40% of the land and therefore only pays 60% of its price should he wish to purchase it. “But for me, House Hamada collected 50% of the price of the land I bought. They deemed that I had a right to the remaining 50%, so they didn’t collect its cost”, says Qataya. This approach to the ownership of agricultural lands paved the way for most farmers to become landowners or partners in the lands they farm.
Like the Qataya family, the main families of Qasr – which Zuaiter says numbered approximately 72 – had partnerships mostly with the Hamada clan, which owned the lands in Lebanon and vast Syrian lands adjoined to them. This partnership was based on work in exchange for land ownership. “I bear the cost of farming and work the land, and I give them 25% of the produce”, says Zuaiter. He adds, “To this day, we still farm lands belonging to the House of Hamada. I, for example, bought half the land we farm from them”. These families include the al-Saymi, Fahda, al-Hilu, Harfush, Matar, Surur, Obeid, Allam, Safwan, al-Saylami, and Shams. Later, the clans – specifically the Nasreddine and Jaafar clans – descended from the jords to inhabit the town with them. Only the Zuaiter clan – which numbers approximately 1,200 voters, according to Ali Zuaiter – came from Afqa, when the clans arrived from Mount Lebanon, directly to Qasr and the villages that were subsequently incorporated into Syria: “In other words, we are one of Qasr’s original families. We were the only clan in the town, though a few houses at that time belonged to the Shams and Nasreddine clans”.
