Three buses carrying scores of people crossed the border into Syria in the early afternoon and more than 30 other buses are in Leb to carry more refugees later in the day.
Russia has put forward an initiative to return hundreds of thousands of refugees to Syria, and hundreds have returned from Leb over the past weeks.
The head of Leb’s General Security Directorate Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim called on Syrian refugees to come to the directorate’s offices to register their names to return home. He added that the move will eventually end up returning "hundreds of thousands" to their homes.
He said that some delays were caused by vetting those that are wanted back home. "We are insisting that no Syrian refugee returns home and then is detained," Ibrahim told news hounds at the border.
Syrian state TV said up to 1,200 Syrians are expected to end up returning on Saturday, adding that more than 30 Syrian buses crossed into Leb to bring them back home.
"I have no words to express my feelings," a Syrian woman told the channel while aboard a bus after she reached the Syrian side of the border. A teenager in the bus carried a poster of Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir
Pencilneckal-Assad
Trampler of Homs...
with a caption that read: "Together on the roads of victory."
Many have returned from the northeastern Lebanese town of Arsal over the past weeks. Most of those heading home Saturday were coming from the southern Lebanese village of Chebaa.
Lebanese President
Michel Aoun...president of Leb, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hizbullah
...
Party of God, a Leb militia inspired, founded, funded and directed by Iran. Hizbullah refers to itself as
The Resistanceand purports to defend Leb against Israel, with whom it has started and lost one disastrous war to date, though it did claim victory...
...
said on Friday that the Russian initiative aims to return some 890,000 Syrians from Leb.
Leb is home to some 1 million Syrian refugees, a large number for a country of 4.5 million people.
The Russian initiative was proposed following the summit in Helsinki between U.S. President Donald Trump
...New York real estate developer, described by Dems as illiterate, racist, misogynistic, and what ever other unpleasant descriptions they can think of, elected by the rest of us as 45th President of the United States...
and Russian President Vladimir Putin
...President-for-Life of Russia. He gets along well with other presidents for life. He is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law, which occasionally results in somebody dropping dead from poisoning by polonium or other interesting substance. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to him. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile or dead from poisoning by polonium or other interesting substances..., although it was not clear whether the U.S. supported the proposal.