The door first slams in the inspectors’ faces, but only briefly. Nidal Ibrahim smiles when he opens the door again to let inspectors from the Zgharta district into his small flat, where his family of nine has lived since fleeing the Syrian town of Idlib four years ago.
We are in northern Lebanon on a Monday night. Like every night, a team of 18 inspectors is dispatched around town to check that Syrians are not out in the streets after the curfew, to see who lives in which building, to photograph any new resident and record his name and city of origin in Syria, and to warn anyone whose residency permit has expired that they need to fix it as soon as possible.