The fall of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad last December was “like being released from prison,” Khalid said.
Khalid, a young father from the town of al-Quseir in the Syrian governorate of Homs, had escaped a Syrian military advance and fled to the northeastern Lebanon town of Arsal more than a decade ago. He spent years in an Arsal-area camp, where he said Lebanese security forces presumptively treated all displaced Syrians like terrorists. When Assad was toppled in December, Khalid returned immediately from Arsal to al-Quseir, just across the border. He has since been supporting his family repairing motorcycles. He and his wife Maryam met the author in their partially rebuilt home.
Khalid said he finally feels free back home in Syria—but he still has three cousins in Lebanese prisons, and a neighbor who has been sentenced to death there. All of them were innocent, he said; Lebanese authorities had forced them to confess.
“Now there’s pressure,” said Maryam. “Because we’ve been liberated, and they haven’t.”
Syria’s transitional government has made the return of thousands of Syrians in Lebanese prisons a priority, and a necessary condition for normalizing relations with Lebanon. Since September, officials from the two countries have been negotiating an agreement to bring these Syrians home. Syrian officials evidently feel accountable to domestic constituents on this; they have repeatedly stressed that they are taking the issue seriously.
But while officials from both countries have said that a repatriation deal is forthcoming, that may not be true. That’s because Syria’s new leaders want to bring home detainees whom they consider to be political prisoners—including Syrians charged with attacks on the Lebanese army and terrorism-related offenses—whose discharge could ignite a political firestorm in Lebanon.
It will not be easy for Lebanon and Syria’s new government to find a solution that both sends such Syrians home and, importantly, can also survive Lebanon’s politics. After all, a new judicial agreement or amnesty would normally require approval by the Lebanese parliament. Now, officials from both countries are trying to work out a compromise agreement—and to lay out the bases for a relationship that, realistically, is going to be difficult.
Lebanon and Syria Negotiate
Syria’s new leadership was slow to reach out to Lebanon after the fall of Assad in December. But when Damascus did begin to seriously engage Beirut several months ago, it put the return of Syrian detainees at the top of its agenda.
Indeed, the administration of Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa made this file central to Foreign Minister As’ad al-Shaibani’s visit to Beirut this October. Shaibani’s travel to Beirut was preceded by several preparatory meetings that were principally focused on the detainee file. Syrian justice minister Madhar al-Weis was part of Shaibani’s delegation to Beirut; days later, Weis returned for negotiations on a judicial cooperation agreement to allow detainees’ repatriation. Weis also visited Lebanon’s Roumieh Prison, where he met with Syrian inmates.
Lebanese officials have welcomed the chance to repatriate Syrian detainees, which would relieve some pressure on the country’s overloaded prison system. Of an estimated 8,500 detainees held in Lebanon late last year, nearly 6,000 were in pretrial detention. Prison conditions have sharply deteriorated since the beginning of Lebanon’s economic crisis in 2019. Muhammad Sablouh, a human rights lawyer, told the author that at least forty-four detainees have died of suicide or from medical neglect in Lebanese custody since 2022.
Lebanon’s prison population includes roughly 2,600 Syrian citizens, according to Lebanese deputy prime minister Tarek Mitri, who has been leading negotiations with Damascus. Some 70 percent of those Syrian detainees are being held in pretrial detention, he said.
Lebanese officials have presented a draft judicial cooperation agreement to their Syrian counterparts and shared a complete list of Syrians in Lebanese detention. Mitri has said this new agreement could permit the handover of some detainees—including those held on “political” charges, such as opposition to Assad and membership in Syrian rebel factions—while excepting others.
It’s those exceptions, though, that are the problem. Lebanese officials have emphasized that they want to “turn the page” with Syria, but they have also repeatedly said that any agreement will exclude Syrians charged with terrorism-related offenses, attacks on Lebanese soldiers, or rape. Yet those exceptions cover some of the “political prisoners” Syria’s new leadership now wants to bring home.
“Political Prisoners”
Syrian officials are not seeking the return of every Syrian detainee—they are not trying to repatriate Islamic State members, for instance. They are, however, asking for Syrians whom their Lebanese counterparts will be reluctant to hand over.
Muhammad Taha al-Ahmad, a Syrian foreign ministry official who has been responsible for managing the relationship with Lebanon, told Syrian state television in October that Damascus has focused most of its attention on Roumieh Prison—Lebanon’s largest. Roumieh’s roughly 4,000 inmates include Syrian “political prisoners,” according to Ahmad; most Syrians held there face charges related to their opposition to Assad, he said. Sablouh has estimated there are between 200 and 220 Syrian detainees in Roumieh facing charges related to Syria’s revolution.
Any new bilateral agreement would likely benefit most Syrian detainees in Lebanon, including Syrians held on criminal charges, but the Syrian government is mainly concerned with this subset of political prisoners.
Detainees that Syria’s new leaders consider “political prisoners” may look, to many in Lebanon, more like terrorists.
Repatriating these prisoners, though, will likely be controversial in Lebanon. Detainees that Syria’s new leaders consider “political prisoners” may look, to many in Lebanon, more like terrorists.
After Weis met with detainees in Roumieh, Lebanese media reported that those detainees included a man charged with involvement in a 2013 car bombing and two participants in 2014 clashes with the Lebanese army in Arsal.
The 2013 car bombing targeted a Shia neighborhood south of Beirut and killed dozens of people. The 2014 clashes in Arsal, meanwhile, reportedly killed over a dozen Lebanese soldiers, and many more civilians. That battle began when Lebanese security forces detained a Syrian militant commander, and Syrian militants belonging to the Nusra Front, the Islamic State, and other factions responded by attacking Lebanese army positions. After days of violence, Syrian militants withdrew from Arsal with captured Lebanese soldiers and policemen; both the Islamic State and the Nusra Front subsequently publicized executions of captive soldiers. The Nusra Front subsequently became Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the armed group that led the offensive that toppled Assad last December. Its leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is now president of Syria.
Legal Frameworks
Lebanese officials have insisted on repatriating these detainees through legal channels, in a way that respects the independence of Lebanon’s judiciary—hence the push for a new judicial cooperation agreement, which would provide a legal basis for Lebanon’s courts to release or transfer these detainees.
Any new Lebanese–Syrian deal will have to be very different from past bilateral agreements, however. Lebanon and Syria’s 1951 judicial agreement governed the extradition of detainees between the two countries for trial or imprisonment. Meanwhile, a 2010 annex that was signed but never ratified permits the transfer of already-convicted prisoners to serve the remainder of their sentences in their country of origin.
Neither of these agreements is applicable in the current situation. They were both premised on a common Lebanese–Syrian understanding of what, exactly, is punishable by law; among other conditions, both agreements stipulate that detainees face charges that are criminal in both countries. Yet Lebanon and Syria, self-evidently, do not agree on the validity of the charges now facing Syrian detainees in Lebanon. In October, Shaibani told state television that talks had seen progress toward an “honorable, dignified” return of Syrians who “were detained on political charges as a result of pressures by the previous regime in Syria.” That type of “honorable, dignified” return is not what these past judicial agreements facilitated.
An agreement that actually brings these Syrian detainees home will likely need to incorporate elements of an amnesty. That could include the release of some Syrians held in protracted pretrial detention; the redefinition of life sentences and the death sentence to a fixed number of years; and the reduction of a “prison year” in affected sentences to, for example, five or six months, such that ten years served would fulfill a twenty-year sentence.
Any new judicial cooperation agreement or amnesty, though, would normally require a vote by Lebanon’s parliament, and winning parliamentary approval will be very challenging—particularly ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled for May 2026.
Lebanon has a history of legislative amnesties. Lebanese factions have debated another general amnesty for years, but, amid disputes over sectarian balancing, they have not agreed on compromise legislation. If an amnesty law is sent to parliament now, parties may demand that it be broadened to include Lebanese detainees important to their respective constituencies—drug offenders, for example. Some parties may oppose any deal outright, and use it to attack electoral rivals now in government.
Lebanese officials’ insistence on law and procedure is no doubt frustrating for their Syrian counterparts. Lebanon does not have Syria’s strong presidency; there is no mechanism for Lebanon’s president or government to simply decree these detainees’ release. But while Syrian officials may understand the complications facing their Lebanese counterparts, they are not invested in the integrity of the Lebanese justice system. To the contrary, Syrian officials clearly do not respect Lebanon’s justice system. They have told Lebanese media that they believe Hezbollah controls Lebanon’s military courts, and that Syrian prisoners were convicted in trials that any high court in the world would consider “farcical.”
These Syrian officials are not the only critics of Lebanon’s military judiciary. Local and international rights organizations have objected to Lebanon’s practice of trying civilians in military courts for terrorism- and national-security-related offenses. They have also condemned related abuses, such as confessions extracted under duress.
But whatever the flaws of Lebanon’s justice system, Lebanese officials have ruled out extralegal options that would circumvent the country’s judiciary. Syrian officials, for their part, have appealed for flexibility. On his last visit to Beirut, Weis said he hoped a new agreement would not only be based on “justice and respect [for] sovereignty,” but would also “take into account changed conditions in Syria, because our view is that what happened in Syria was something major on a legal and constitutional level, and it has to be taken into account.” If Lebanese officials do not yield, though, Syrian officials may have little choice but to attempt a solution within the Lebanese system’s constraints.
Culture Clash
It seems clear from these negotiations that Lebanon and Syrian officials’ engagement is going to be a learning process.
Assad’s Syria was deeply enmeshed in Lebanon, both directly during its twenty-nine-year occupation of the country and, after it withdrew in 2005, indirectly through local partners. Syria’s new leadership lacks that granular knowledge of Lebanon; it is only now getting a crash course in the complexity and dysfunction of the Lebanese system.
When Syrian officials encounter institutional resistance from the Lebanese system, their apparent reflex is to blame Hezbollah’s influence. Yet these Syrian officials are likely just running up against Lebanon’s fragmented, unruly politics, in which any number of factions can block consensus and frustrate policy action.
Lebanese decision-makers, meanwhile, need to get used to their new—and very different—Syrian interlocutors. There used to be broad consensus—not just in Lebanon and Syria, but around the world—that groups like the Nusra Front and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham were proscribed, and out of bounds. Now, Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa and his comrades are being feted in regional and Western capitals. Lebanese officials are negotiating with Syrians who have been rehabilitated on the global stage—but who are also asking for the release of Syrians who battled the Lebanese army, or who allegedly perpetrated urban bombings.
Such is the reality, however, in which Lebanon and Syria now find themselves. Now, their officials not only need to negotiate a deal that will bring these Syrian detainees home—they also need to work out some new modus vivendi for their two countries.
This commentary is part of “Networks of Change: Reviving Governance and Citizenship in the Middle East,” a Century International project supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations.
Header Image: Ahmed Muhammad Al-Nawa (L) is greeted by a neighborhood friend after returning home from Lebanon to his family’s home in the village of Harran for the first time in ten years on December 21, 2024, in Damascus, Syria. Thirty-six-year-old Ahmed was imprisoned and tortured by the Assad regime for a year and a half in the Mezzeh Military Prison in 2012–13. He later fled with his wife and daughter to Lebanon, where they lived in a tent in the Hosh Al-Hareem camp for a decade. Source: Chris McGrath/Getty Images
Tags: repatriation, lebanon, syria
Lebanon and Syria’s Detainee Dilemma
The fall of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad last December was “like being released from prison,” Khalid said.
Khalid, a young father from the town of al-Quseir in the Syrian governorate of Homs, had escaped a Syrian military advance and fled to the northeastern Lebanon town of Arsal more than a decade ago. He spent years in an Arsal-area camp, where he said Lebanese security forces presumptively treated all displaced Syrians like terrorists. When Assad was toppled in December, Khalid returned immediately from Arsal to al-Quseir, just across the border. He has since been supporting his family repairing motorcycles. He and his wife Maryam met the author in their partially rebuilt home.
Khalid said he finally feels free back home in Syria—but he still has three cousins in Lebanese prisons, and a neighbor who has been sentenced to death there. All of them were innocent, he said; Lebanese authorities had forced them to confess.
“Now there’s pressure,” said Maryam. “Because we’ve been liberated, and they haven’t.”
Syria’s transitional government has made the return of thousands of Syrians in Lebanese prisons a priority, and a necessary condition for normalizing relations with Lebanon. Since September, officials from the two countries have been negotiating an agreement to bring these Syrians home. Syrian officials evidently feel accountable to domestic constituents on this; they have repeatedly stressed that they are taking the issue seriously.
But while officials from both countries have said that a repatriation deal is forthcoming, that may not be true. That’s because Syria’s new leaders want to bring home detainees whom they consider to be political prisoners—including Syrians charged with attacks on the Lebanese army and terrorism-related offenses—whose discharge could ignite a political firestorm in Lebanon.
It will not be easy for Lebanon and Syria’s new government to find a solution that both sends such Syrians home and, importantly, can also survive Lebanon’s politics. After all, a new judicial agreement or amnesty would normally require approval by the Lebanese parliament. Now, officials from both countries are trying to work out a compromise agreement—and to lay out the bases for a relationship that, realistically, is going to be difficult.
Lebanon and Syria Negotiate
Syria’s new leadership was slow to reach out to Lebanon after the fall of Assad in December. But when Damascus did begin to seriously engage Beirut several months ago, it put the return of Syrian detainees at the top of its agenda.
Indeed, the administration of Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa made this file central to Foreign Minister As’ad al-Shaibani’s visit to Beirut this October. Shaibani’s travel to Beirut was preceded by several preparatory meetings that were principally focused on the detainee file. Syrian justice minister Madhar al-Weis was part of Shaibani’s delegation to Beirut; days later, Weis returned for negotiations on a judicial cooperation agreement to allow detainees’ repatriation. Weis also visited Lebanon’s Roumieh Prison, where he met with Syrian inmates.
Lebanese officials have welcomed the chance to repatriate Syrian detainees, which would relieve some pressure on the country’s overloaded prison system. Of an estimated 8,500 detainees held in Lebanon late last year, nearly 6,000 were in pretrial detention. Prison conditions have sharply deteriorated since the beginning of Lebanon’s economic crisis in 2019. Muhammad Sablouh, a human rights lawyer, told the author that at least forty-four detainees have died of suicide or from medical neglect in Lebanese custody since 2022.
Lebanon’s prison population includes roughly 2,600 Syrian citizens, according to Lebanese deputy prime minister Tarek Mitri, who has been leading negotiations with Damascus. Some 70 percent of those Syrian detainees are being held in pretrial detention, he said.
Lebanese officials have presented a draft judicial cooperation agreement to their Syrian counterparts and shared a complete list of Syrians in Lebanese detention. Mitri has said this new agreement could permit the handover of some detainees—including those held on “political” charges, such as opposition to Assad and membership in Syrian rebel factions—while excepting others.
It’s those exceptions, though, that are the problem. Lebanese officials have emphasized that they want to “turn the page” with Syria, but they have also repeatedly said that any agreement will exclude Syrians charged with terrorism-related offenses, attacks on Lebanese soldiers, or rape. Yet those exceptions cover some of the “political prisoners” Syria’s new leadership now wants to bring home.
“Political Prisoners”
Syrian officials are not seeking the return of every Syrian detainee—they are not trying to repatriate Islamic State members, for instance. They are, however, asking for Syrians whom their Lebanese counterparts will be reluctant to hand over.
Muhammad Taha al-Ahmad, a Syrian foreign ministry official who has been responsible for managing the relationship with Lebanon, told Syrian state television in October that Damascus has focused most of its attention on Roumieh Prison—Lebanon’s largest. Roumieh’s roughly 4,000 inmates include Syrian “political prisoners,” according to Ahmad; most Syrians held there face charges related to their opposition to Assad, he said. Sablouh has estimated there are between 200 and 220 Syrian detainees in Roumieh facing charges related to Syria’s revolution.
Any new bilateral agreement would likely benefit most Syrian detainees in Lebanon, including Syrians held on criminal charges, but the Syrian government is mainly concerned with this subset of political prisoners.
Repatriating these prisoners, though, will likely be controversial in Lebanon. Detainees that Syria’s new leaders consider “political prisoners” may look, to many in Lebanon, more like terrorists.
After Weis met with detainees in Roumieh, Lebanese media reported that those detainees included a man charged with involvement in a 2013 car bombing and two participants in 2014 clashes with the Lebanese army in Arsal.
The 2013 car bombing targeted a Shia neighborhood south of Beirut and killed dozens of people. The 2014 clashes in Arsal, meanwhile, reportedly killed over a dozen Lebanese soldiers, and many more civilians. That battle began when Lebanese security forces detained a Syrian militant commander, and Syrian militants belonging to the Nusra Front, the Islamic State, and other factions responded by attacking Lebanese army positions. After days of violence, Syrian militants withdrew from Arsal with captured Lebanese soldiers and policemen; both the Islamic State and the Nusra Front subsequently publicized executions of captive soldiers. The Nusra Front subsequently became Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the armed group that led the offensive that toppled Assad last December. Its leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is now president of Syria.
Legal Frameworks
Lebanese officials have insisted on repatriating these detainees through legal channels, in a way that respects the independence of Lebanon’s judiciary—hence the push for a new judicial cooperation agreement, which would provide a legal basis for Lebanon’s courts to release or transfer these detainees.
Any new Lebanese–Syrian deal will have to be very different from past bilateral agreements, however. Lebanon and Syria’s 1951 judicial agreement governed the extradition of detainees between the two countries for trial or imprisonment. Meanwhile, a 2010 annex that was signed but never ratified permits the transfer of already-convicted prisoners to serve the remainder of their sentences in their country of origin.
Neither of these agreements is applicable in the current situation. They were both premised on a common Lebanese–Syrian understanding of what, exactly, is punishable by law; among other conditions, both agreements stipulate that detainees face charges that are criminal in both countries. Yet Lebanon and Syria, self-evidently, do not agree on the validity of the charges now facing Syrian detainees in Lebanon. In October, Shaibani told state television that talks had seen progress toward an “honorable, dignified” return of Syrians who “were detained on political charges as a result of pressures by the previous regime in Syria.” That type of “honorable, dignified” return is not what these past judicial agreements facilitated.
An agreement that actually brings these Syrian detainees home will likely need to incorporate elements of an amnesty. That could include the release of some Syrians held in protracted pretrial detention; the redefinition of life sentences and the death sentence to a fixed number of years; and the reduction of a “prison year” in affected sentences to, for example, five or six months, such that ten years served would fulfill a twenty-year sentence.
Any new judicial cooperation agreement or amnesty, though, would normally require a vote by Lebanon’s parliament, and winning parliamentary approval will be very challenging—particularly ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled for May 2026.
Lebanon has a history of legislative amnesties. Lebanese factions have debated another general amnesty for years, but, amid disputes over sectarian balancing, they have not agreed on compromise legislation. If an amnesty law is sent to parliament now, parties may demand that it be broadened to include Lebanese detainees important to their respective constituencies—drug offenders, for example. Some parties may oppose any deal outright, and use it to attack electoral rivals now in government.
Lebanese officials’ insistence on law and procedure is no doubt frustrating for their Syrian counterparts. Lebanon does not have Syria’s strong presidency; there is no mechanism for Lebanon’s president or government to simply decree these detainees’ release. But while Syrian officials may understand the complications facing their Lebanese counterparts, they are not invested in the integrity of the Lebanese justice system. To the contrary, Syrian officials clearly do not respect Lebanon’s justice system. They have told Lebanese media that they believe Hezbollah controls Lebanon’s military courts, and that Syrian prisoners were convicted in trials that any high court in the world would consider “farcical.”
These Syrian officials are not the only critics of Lebanon’s military judiciary. Local and international rights organizations have objected to Lebanon’s practice of trying civilians in military courts for terrorism- and national-security-related offenses. They have also condemned related abuses, such as confessions extracted under duress.
But whatever the flaws of Lebanon’s justice system, Lebanese officials have ruled out extralegal options that would circumvent the country’s judiciary. Syrian officials, for their part, have appealed for flexibility. On his last visit to Beirut, Weis said he hoped a new agreement would not only be based on “justice and respect [for] sovereignty,” but would also “take into account changed conditions in Syria, because our view is that what happened in Syria was something major on a legal and constitutional level, and it has to be taken into account.” If Lebanese officials do not yield, though, Syrian officials may have little choice but to attempt a solution within the Lebanese system’s constraints.
Culture Clash
It seems clear from these negotiations that Lebanon and Syrian officials’ engagement is going to be a learning process.
Assad’s Syria was deeply enmeshed in Lebanon, both directly during its twenty-nine-year occupation of the country and, after it withdrew in 2005, indirectly through local partners. Syria’s new leadership lacks that granular knowledge of Lebanon; it is only now getting a crash course in the complexity and dysfunction of the Lebanese system.
When Syrian officials encounter institutional resistance from the Lebanese system, their apparent reflex is to blame Hezbollah’s influence. Yet these Syrian officials are likely just running up against Lebanon’s fragmented, unruly politics, in which any number of factions can block consensus and frustrate policy action.
Lebanese decision-makers, meanwhile, need to get used to their new—and very different—Syrian interlocutors. There used to be broad consensus—not just in Lebanon and Syria, but around the world—that groups like the Nusra Front and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham were proscribed, and out of bounds. Now, Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa and his comrades are being feted in regional and Western capitals. Lebanese officials are negotiating with Syrians who have been rehabilitated on the global stage—but who are also asking for the release of Syrians who battled the Lebanese army, or who allegedly perpetrated urban bombings.
Such is the reality, however, in which Lebanon and Syria now find themselves. Now, their officials not only need to negotiate a deal that will bring these Syrian detainees home—they also need to work out some new modus vivendi for their two countries.
This commentary is part of “Networks of Change: Reviving Governance and Citizenship in the Middle East,” a Century International project supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations.
Header Image: Ahmed Muhammad Al-Nawa (L) is greeted by a neighborhood friend after returning home from Lebanon to his family’s home in the village of Harran for the first time in ten years on December 21, 2024, in Damascus, Syria. Thirty-six-year-old Ahmed was imprisoned and tortured by the Assad regime for a year and a half in the Mezzeh Military Prison in 2012–13. He later fled with his wife and daughter to Lebanon, where they lived in a tent in the Hosh Al-Hareem camp for a decade. Source: Chris McGrath/Getty Images
Tags: repatriation, lebanon, syria