The Syrian authorities sent back on Friday the displaced Syrians who had crossed the border from Lebanon via al-Masnaa crossing point.
Earlier, the General Security granted the Syrian families leaving
Arsal permission to cross the border back into Syria via the al-Masnaa crossing point, on the condition that they hold Syrian identification documents.
The families spent their night in the open air, where they slept on mattresses along the highway. Among those refugees were 780 children, 290 elderly and 700 women.
The Syrian authorities had initially refused to allow the refugees’ return after realizing that there are no men among them, “since the men were those fighting in Arsal.”
Clashes erupted in Arsal on Saturday afternoon when Syrian gunmen deployed across the region after the Lebanese Armed Forces arrested Syrian national Imad Ahmad Jomaa at a checkpoint.
The army said 17 soldiers have been killed, with at least 30 other ISF and LAF soldiers missing and 86 injured in the fighting.
Lebanese security officials say the fighters include members of al Qaeda's Syria branch, the Nusra Front, and an al Qaeda splinter group, the Islamic State, which has seized swathes of land in Syria and Iraq.
Militant Islamists have mostly withdrawn from a Lebanese border town they seized at the weekend, taking with them captive Lebanese soldiers, militant and security sources said on Thursday, as a truce to end the deadly battle appeared to hold after 5 days of fighting.
Muslim clerics who had been mediating an end to five days of fighting in Arsal said they would negotiate for the release of remaining captives held by militants whose incursion into Lebanon marked the most serious spillover of Syria's three-year-old civil war into Lebanese territory.
An operation mediated by a nun and supported by the Lebanese Army Intelligence, a convoy carrying 1,800 Syrian refugees headed from Arsal for Syria via the al-Masnaa crossing point where the refugees spent their night.
The taking of Arsal was the first major incursion into Lebanon by hardline Sunni militants - leading players in Sunni-Shi'ite violence unfolding across the Levant - which threatens the stability of Lebanon by inflaming its own sectarian tensions.
Arsal is a Sunni Muslim town at the border where tens of thousands of refugees have taken shelter from the war in neighboring Syria. Their refugee camps have been badly damaged in the fighting, Syrian activists have reported.
For more details, watch Bassam Abou Zeid's report in the VIDEO above
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