ARSAL, Lebanon — The once sleepy little town of Arsal lies in the far east of the arid Bekaa Valley, along the Lebanese-Syrian border. With its unpaved roads and half-finished stone buildings, Arsal had been a typical dusty and isolated border town, but since the beginning of the uprising in neighboring Syria, it has taken on a much larger role: It is now host to a Syrian refugee population that is more than double the size of the town’s Lebanese residents. Arsal is cracking under the pressure.
The refugees began flowing into town soon after the Syrian conflict erupted in 2011. Arsal had always been a transit point and job site for Syrian laborers, so many of them decided to settle there to wait out the crisis. When clashes in Syria began to rock the border areas — particularly during the 2013 spring battle of Qusair, that winter’s fighting in Qalamoun and the recent clashes in Yabrud this month — the number of refugees in Arsal rapidly increased.
