Fact Checking the Arab Media

In an unattributed article entitled “The Hezbollah concept collapses” on the “News as History” website Strategy Page, the author makes a number of unsubstantiated claims, including that “few Syrian Shia want to have anything to do with Syrian Hezbollah,” a reference apparently to Lebanon’s Hezbollah (doctrinally, a Shia organization) which has allegedly been trying to reproduce a version of itself amongst Syria’s very small Shia community. Although the piece marshalls no evidence for this or other claims, and further fails to cite references for its demographic claims about Syria itself, three claims, in particular, are raised that are very often repeated - falsely - across a range of articles on the devastating Syrian refugee crisis.

First, the author states: “Two million Syrian Sunni Arab refugees fled to Lebanon after 2012. That meant the Lebanese Shia are now a smaller minority. Lebanon is overwhelmed, economically and otherwise, by the two million Syrian refugees it is hosting.” However, as has been widely documented by the UN agency overseeing refugees in Lebanon - UNHCR - as well as a number of International NGOs, the number of registered Syrian refugees in the Fall of 2021 was 851,717. Although the Lebanese government continues to claim that 1.5 million Syrian refugees are currently in their country, this is still half a million fewer refugees than the article says Lebanon is currently hosting.

Furthermore, while it is generally accepted that the majority of Syrians fleeing their country to Lebanon have been Sunni, no monitoring organization has ever claimed - as the article does - that all the refugees were in fact Sunni. In fact, tens of thousands of Syrian refugees identify with a variety of other sects and religious faiths, including Allawis, Shia and Christians, to say nothing of those Syrian refugees who don’t identify with any sect or religion.

Finally, the author also claims: “The Sunni refugees radically changed the religious mix of Lebanon from 27 percent Shia, 27 percent Sunni, and 46 percent Christian (and other religions) to a more volatile combination.” This assertion is also false. While there has been no official census in Lebanon since 1932, Statistics Lebanon, which is widely cited by governments and other Lebanese demographic reports, estimates that 67.6 percent of the citizen population is Muslim (31.9 percent Sunni, 31 percent Shia, and small percentages of Alawites and Ismailis). They further estimate that 32.4 percent of the population is Christian, a gap of almost 14% compared to Stragey Page’s unsourced claim.