Rest for the Wicked: The Risks for Lebanon in Sheltering Assad’s Fugitives

The prisoner agreement demonstrated that when Lebanon and Syria choose to act through legal channels, they can reach agreements on sensitive cases, even those entangled in decades of mutual grievance. But it also created a stark contrast with how the Lebanese government is handling the parallel question of former regime figures in the country, where it has no declared policy, no legal framework, and no unified institutional response. It is imperative that the Lebanese government address the situation, but what remains unclear is whether it can do so on its own terms, through a coherent legal and institutional framework, before the terms are dictated by forces beyond its control.

The situation is worse than mere neglect. Lebanon has received formal legal requests from France, Germany, and the United States demanding action on individuals convicted of or charged with crimes against humanity. It has not responded to any of them. Its own institutions, security agencies, the judiciary, the executive, are each handling fragments of the case without coordination, producing parallel actions that amount to nothing. Meanwhile, local and international media outlets have documented active insurgency networks operating in part from Lebanese territory, with former regime commanders distributing payments, recruiting fighters, and coordinating with exiled generals in Moscow.

This policy brief recommends that Lebanon pursue a dual-track approach. On the domestic track, the government should respond formally to the outstanding legal requests, establish a legal framework that assigns institutional responsibility for classifying and managing these individuals, and shift decision-making from agency-level improvisation to declared government policy. On the diplomatic track, it should pursue bilateral cooperation with Damascus, building on the prisoner repatriation model, and explore managed departures to third countries for specific cases, a mechanism Lebanon has used before. These tracks should operate simultaneously and be linked to other sovereign files with Syria, above all the prisoner dossier, within a comprehensive bilateral framework rather than as isolated crisis responses.

The Information Fog

In the days following the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, the Lebanese newspaper Nida al-Watan reported that the number of Syrian security and intelligence officers who had fled to Lebanon were estimated to be “in the thousands,” and that Hezbollah and a Lebanese General Security officer at the Masnaa border crossing had coordinated the arrival of prominent Assad regime figures. Among them was Ali Mamlouk, Assad’s national security adviser, who was, according to the report, hiding in Beirut’s southern suburbs under Hezbollah protection.

Days later, Saudi channel Al-Hadath reported that Mamlouk flew from Rafik Hariri International Airport and arrived in northern Iraq, with the AFP newswire subsequently documenting he had left Iraq for Russia. Lebanon’s Interior Minister, however, denied that Mamlouk had entered the country through a legal border crossing.

Adding to the information fog the Lebanese government has let settle over the issue are the ostensibly credible but conflicting media investigations that have arisen. In December 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported that Syrian and Western officials suspected Jamil Hassan, the former head of Syria’s Air Force Intelligence and arguably the single most wanted figure from the Assad security apparatus, was in Lebanon, where networks linked to the former regime’s intelligence apparatus were reportedly regrouping. Lebanese judicial authorities told the paper they had “no confirmed information” about his whereabouts. Ten days later, a New York Times report placed him in Moscow, citing three people who said they had met him there.

Thus, while the details surrounding Syrian regime figures in Lebanon remains hazy, the general picture that has emerged suggests two categories. The first consists of senior figures who used Lebanon as a transit point before moving on, though whether some have returned or maintained operational links through Lebanese intermediaries remains unclear. The New York Times, for instance, reported that Kamal al-Hassan, the former military intelligence chief now in Moscow, has traveled to meet collaborators in Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria over the past year.

The second category is more troubling from the standpoint of sovereignty: mid-level and field commanders who appear to have settled in northern Lebanon, particularly in Alawite communities in Akkar and the Jabal Mohsen area, following the sectarian violence targeting Syrian Alawites along that country’s coast in March 2025. Their embedding in local communities complicates any response, since removal would require navigating local political dynamics alongside the legal and diplomatic ones.

The Legal and Institutional Vacuum

Former Syrian regime figures in Lebanon are not refugees, and they are not ordinary administrative cases. They do not fit any of the legal categories Lebanon typically uses to handle foreign nationals on its territory. But they are still protected by international law, which means they cannot simply be expelled, detained, or handed over without legal process.

What makes this situation additionally fraught for Lebanon is that three competing considerations are pulling in different directions at once. Lebanon has the sovereign right to decide who stays on its territory. It also has international legal obligations, above all the principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits sending people to places where they may face torture or persecution, and the guarantee of a fair trial. And it faces political and security pressures tied to its relationships with Damascus, the broader region, and beyond. Any action, or inaction, on Syrian regime figures implicates all three considerations.

Making this predicament concrete rather than theoretical is the accumulation of formal legal demands that Lebanon has received but has not responded to. In November 2025, France submitted a formal legal request to Chief Public Prosecutor Judge Jamal Hajjar, demanding assistance in tracking and arresting three former senior intelligence officials: Jamil al-Hassan, Ali Mamlouk, and Abdelsalam Mahmoud, former head of the investigation branch in Air Force Intelligence. The request was part of an ongoing case in which all three had been convicted in absentia by the Paris Cour d’assises in May 2024 for complicity in crimes against humanity, specifically the torture and killing of French citizens of Syrian descent held in Air Force Intelligence detention. The French filing included Lebanese telephone numbers said to be in regular contact with the suspects, a detail that implied France believed the men were reachable through Lebanese networks even if their physical location was uncertain.

Lebanon had also previously received an Interpol notice demanding implementation of a US arrest warrant for al-Hassan and Mamlouk. The day after the fall of the Assad regime, US authorities unsealed separate war crimes charges against al-Hassan and Mahmoud. Germany had issued an arrest warrant for al-Hassan in June 2018 for crimes against humanity, and the US State Department publicly called on Lebanon to facilitate his extradition to Berlin at that time, when he was reportedly receiving medical treatment in a Lebanese hospital. Lebanon did not act on the German warrant then, and al-Hassan’s subsequent movements remain disputed.

These official requests carry legal obligations. France, Germany, and the United States have each pursued formal judicial instruments through recognized channels. Yet no arrests have been made, no formal refusals have been issued, and no public legal reasoning has been offered for the inaction. The silence is itself a form of policy, though one that Lebanon cannot defend before any external interlocutor as a principled legal position.

The deeper structural problem is the absence of a domestic legal framework capable of classifying these individuals and defining a pathway for handling them, compounded by the fragmentation of decision-making across institutions that operate with different information, different priorities, and no mechanism for coordination. Security agencies view the case through the lens of immediate risk: movement control, preventing escalation, and keeping the situation out of the media. The judiciary treats it as a question requiring clear legal pathways, but is hindered by the absence of political referrals outlining state policy. The executive fears that decisive action in any direction could trigger internal tensions or open a diplomatic confrontation.

These distributed interests produce parallel and sometimes contradictory approaches. In December 2024, when media reported regime figures arriving in Beirut, the Interior Minister denied that any such individuals had entered through legal border crossings. But the denial was narrowly worded, addressing legal crossings, not presence. And within days, the General Security officer in charge of the Masnaa border crossing was quietly ordered off duty because of his ties to Assad’s brother, an implicit acknowledgment that the border had been compromised even as the government publicly insisted it had not been.

A year later, the pattern repeated at a higher level but with the same incoherence. On January 2, 2026, Deputy Prime Minister Mitri said he was alarmed by reports that former Syrian regime figures were plotting against Damascus from Lebanese territory, and called on security agencies to verify and act. Nine days later, President Joseph Aoun stated that raids had uncovered no evidence of former regime officers in the country; the Army detained 38 Syrians on charges including illegal entry and weapons possession, but none were the figures at the center of the case.

Meanwhile, the judiciary had its own track. Chief Public Prosecutor Hajjar had been formally tasked in November 2025 with investigating the French request, and the ISF information branch was instructed to determine whether the suspects were in Lebanon; no public findings have since been reported.

And at the security-to-security level, a separate channel was operating entirely outside public view. Syrian officials met with their Lebanese counterparts in December 2025 to present a list of some 200 wanted for extradition and prosecution. Lebanese officials confirmed the meetings but played down their scope.

What emerges from this sequence is a set of institutions, each doing something without any of them doing enough, and none of them coordinating with the others. The executive expresses concern but defers to security agencies. The security agencies conduct raids but find nothing that addresses the core question. The judiciary investigates a foreign legal request but produces no public result. And diplomatic meetings with Syrian officials proceed through informal channels that generate no binding commitments.

The principle of non-refoulement adds a further layer of constraint. Lebanon cannot deport individuals to jurisdictions where they may face treatment that violates international humanitarian law. This is a legitimate consideration, and one that a well-designed domestic framework would address through due process. But in the absence of such a framework, non-refoulement functions less as a safeguard than as a convenient justification for inaction, invoked selectively and never tested through formal judicial proceedings.

A state without a declared stance and clear standards is more exposed to external pressure because it cannot defend its choices as the application of general rules. It appears instead to be reacting to momentary balances or shifting pressures. In a case as sensitive as pursuing suspected war criminals attempting to destabilize a neighbouring state, ambiguity may appear to temporarily calm tensions, but in reality, it lets the potential fallout quietly metastasize.

The View from Damascus and Beyond

Many eyes are watching how Lebanon is handling this situation. The new Syrian authorities, for instance, view the case of Assad-era figures in Lebanon through the lens of reasserting their own central state control after the regime’s collapse. For Damascus, the presence of former regime figures outside Syrian territory is tied to the new government’s legitimacy and its ability to monopolize the political and security spheres. This dimension has grown more urgent as the central government has sought to consolidate authority across Syrian geography.

Its efforts were violently tested in March 2025, when former regime security forces launched a coordinated attack on government troops in Syria’s coastal provinces. The attack triggered a wave of sectarian killings that left over 1,400 people dead, the majority Alawite civilians. The episode became a rallying point for former officers in exile and gave concrete urgency to Damascus’s concern that former regime networks were organising across borders.

In December 2025, the New York Times reported that it had tracked 55 former regime enforcers to locations in Russia, the UAE, Lebanon, and Syria. Al Jazeera’s investigation revealed that Suheil al-Hassan, former commander of the Tiger Forces elite commando unit, had established an office in al-Hayseh, a village in the Akkar plain near the Lebanese-Syrian border, to manage military operations inside Syria. Leaked documents showed that fighters affiliated with former regime loyalists numbered around 168,000, distributed across Homs, Hama, Damascus, and the coast, with deployment maps and weapons inventories. Ghiath Dalla, a former brigadier general believed to be in Lebanon, was reported to have distributed monthly payments to potential fighters and commanders on behalf of Suheil al-Hassan.

A Reuters investigation found competing networks organising from Moscow. Kamal Hassan, former head of military intelligence, and Rami Makhlouf, Assad’s billionaire cousin, were each attempting to build rival militia forces among Syria’s Alawite population, with their deputies operating in Russia, Lebanon, and the UAE. Reuters found intermediaries in Lebanon being used to channel funds aimed at stirring unrest in the coastal region.

Damascus has responded on two tracks. Diplomatically, the Syrian Justice Minister visited Beirut in October 2025 and called on Lebanese authorities to hand over former regime officials, framing the request within broader judicial cooperation rather than as a unilateral demand. On the security track, Syrian officials met with Lebanese intelligence and security counterparts in Beirut in December 2025 to present a list of wanted former officers and discuss possibilities for prosecution or extradition.

The framing as cooperation, not confrontation, suggests Damascus is aware that heavy-handed demands would backfire. But any Lebanese handling that ignores Damascus’s drive to consolidate state authority will be read as negligence at best, and as an attempt to preserve leverage at worst.

The European track is the most legally developed. The French conviction, the formal request to Lebanon’s Chief Public Prosecutor, the Interpol notices, the German warrant, and the US war crimes charges together create a body of obligations that Lebanon has neither fulfilled nor formally contested. For European governments, Lebanon’s silence is becoming harder to distinguish from complicity, particularly as the EU has imposed new sanctions on figures like Dalla for involvement in the March 2025 violence.

The Gulf states have taken a quieter path. The UAE made fleeing Syrian leaders sign agreements not to make political statements, but has not prevented them from settling or investing. This amounts to managed tolerance rather than accountability, a precedent Lebanon cannot safely rely on given that it shares a border with Syria and is directly affected by the operational activities of these networks.

A less visible but potentially significant pressure comes from Washington. The New York Times found that Kamal Hassan is the driving force behind a Beirut-based organization called Western Syria Development. This organization has retained the Washington lobbying firm Tiger Hill Partners and Joseph E. Schmitz, a former Trump adviser and Blackwater executive, on a million-dollar contract to lobby US lawmakers for international protection for Syria’s Alawite coastal region. The foundation publicized meetings with the offices of six members of Congress on their social media accounts. Diplomats in Syria told the Times they found this lobbying track more troubling than the insurgency plotting, because it could gradually build a case for a semi-autonomous region, a development that would directly affect Lebanon’s border security and its relationship with Damascus.

Policy Recommendations

Lebanon’s inaction is becoming an increasingly tenuous position to hold. The current posture of bureaucratic silence satisfies no external stakeholder, provides no legal cover, and leaves the state exposed to pressure from every direction. This paper recommends a dual-track approach, domestic and diplomatic, pursued simultaneously and linked within a comprehensive framework for managing Lebanon’s sovereign files with Syria.

Domestic Track

Respond formally to outstanding legal requests: The Lebanese government should instruct Chief Public Prosecutor Hajjar, who has already been tasked with investigating the French request, to issue a formal response to all pending legal instruments: the French request, the Interpol notices, and the German warrant. A formal response does not require Lebanon to comply with every demand. It can raise legitimate procedural objections, request additional evidence, or identify steps Lebanon intends to take. What it cannot do is continue to say nothing. Silence is not a legal position. A reasoned reply, even a cautious one, is. The absence of any response is what allows France, Germany, and the United States each to argue that their requests have been ignored without cause, an argument Lebanon currently has no basis to contest.

Establish a domestic legal framework: Lebanon needs a policy decision assigning a single institution lead responsibility for this dossier, defining classification criteria for the individuals concerned, and specifying the judicial oversight that applies to decisions about detention, residency, or transfer. This does not require new legislation in the first instance. It requires the executive to decide who is in charge and on what basis. The current situation, in which security agencies, the judiciary, and the executive each handle fragments of the case without coordination, is the structural source of the paralysis documented in this paper. Until it is resolved, Lebanon will continue producing the pattern of contradictory responses that has defined its handling of the case.

Shift decision-making from agency-level improvisation to declared government policy: The regime figures dossier is currently managed at the lowest possible institutional level through informal security channels that operate without public mandate or legal accountability. A declared government policy, even one that acknowledges the difficulty of the case and the constraints Lebanon faces, would be more defensible, domestically and internationally, than the current posture of bureaucratic silence. It would also allow Lebanon to link this dossier to other sovereign files, especially the prisoner file, within a comprehensive approach to relations with Damascus rather than treating each as a separate crisis to be managed ad hoc.

Diplomatic Track

Pursue bilateral cooperation with Damascus, building on the prisoner repatriation model: The February 2026 prisoner agreement demonstrates that legal agreements between Lebanon and Syria are achievable when both sides see a benefit. That framework, negotiated through diplomatic channels with ministerial involvement, provides a model for handling the more sensitive question of former regime figures, provided it includes adequate judicial safeguards. Damascus has signaled willingness to work through legal channels rather than demanding unilateral handovers, and Lebanon has an interest in ensuring that any transfers occur within a framework it can defend publicly. Linking the regime figures dossier to the broader bilateral relationship, rather than treating it in isolation, would also give Lebanon greater negotiating room.

Explore managed departures to third countries for specific cases: Lebanon does not have to choose between handing individuals over to Damascus and keeping them indefinitely in legal limbo. A third option exists: facilitating departures to countries willing to receive them, whether for prosecution, asylum proceedings, or other legal processes.

In 1969, when Teymour Bakhtiar, the head of Savak intelligence agency of Iran under the Shah, arrived in Beirut, Lebanese authorities weighed the political risks of hosting a figure wanted by the Iranian government against their legal obligations and the principle of non-refoulement. Bakhtiar was ultimately allowed to transit to Iraq , where he was granted asylum and lived until his assassination in 1970.

The case involved a managed departure to a third country, a solution that respected both Lebanon’s sovereignty and its international obligations while removing the source of political pressure from its territory. This mechanism is historically available and legally defensible. What it requires is diplomatic groundwork that no one has yet undertaken.

None of these recommendations eliminates political risk. Responding to the French request may irritate actors who prefer the status quo. Establishing a domestic framework requires institutional coordination that Lebanon’s political culture resists. Cooperating with Damascus raises concerns about fair trial guarantees. And facilitating departures to third countries requires diplomatic engagement that takes time. But each of these carries less risk than the current posture, which is eroding Lebanon’s credibility, exposing it to escalating external pressure, and allowing its territory to be used for activities that directly threaten the stability of a neighbouring state.