“For three days I have been coming here to get food assistance for me and my four children. Every time, I get turned away and promised aid if I come back the next day. But these promises are empty.”

With that, the middle-aged woman unscrewed the cap off the bottle, raised it above her head and emptied its contents. She then took out a lighter and set herself on fire. Her four children looked on.

One out of a nearly a million refugees who have arrived in Lebanon after fleeing the Syrian civil war, Mariam Abdelkader resorted to the only means she could think of to get attention. Her self-immolation at a UN registration center in Tripoli on March 25 illustrates the desperate plight of Syrians escaping comparable horrors in their home country.

Thankfully, onlookers were able to smother the flames to prevent an agonizing death. Yet, while Ms. Abdelkader recovers from her wounds, the horrific predicament the refugees face continues.

In the past 18 months, almost 1 million Syrians have flooded over the border into Lebanon, effectively increasing the small country’s population by 25 percent. In real terms, this equates to 80 million Mexicans crossing the Rio Grande into the United States, in desperate need of all basic human necessities: food, shelter, medical treatment and, the longer they stay, employment.

Lebanon ought to be praised for its herculean effort in sheltering the Syrians.

However, by absorbing so many refugees, at a current rate of 12,000 per week, Lebanon itself is in danger of igniting.

“Already we are seeing signs of tension, not surprisingly, between the Syrians that are arriving and the Lebanese host communities,” the acting UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Lebanon, Ross Mountain, said at a conference in Geneva on March 18. “But the fear that many of us have is that, mixed with other factors, this could mean rising tension between communities within Lebanon” (emphasis added).

Until now, Lebanon has worked tirelessly to extinguish tensions within its own fractured populace. However, while the UN is doing its part to feed and house many of the Syrians, the refugees are also flooding Lebanon’s workplace with cheap labor, undercutting already poor Lebanese communities.

The result? Poverty levels among Lebanese have flared so much that many are seeking fake Syrian IDs to get access to the refugee aid.

“There is not a single country in the world today that is shouldering as much in proportion to its size as Lebanon,” Ninette Kelly, a regional representative for Lebanon for the office of the UN High Commission for Refugees, told Reuters on March 28.

She continued, “If this country is not bolstered, then the very real prospect of it collapsing and the conflict of Syria spreading full force to Lebanon becomes much more likely!”

The severity of this refugee crisis in Lebanon would be extremely difficult for any well-governed, financially successful state to handle. Unfortunately, Lebanon, the country whose arms outreached the widest, has neither the leadership nor the funds to continue supporting the refugees and provide for its own people at the same time.

As the Syrian wildfire burns on, refugees will continue to blow over the mountains into Lebanon. International agencies are desperately needed to mitigate the situation on the ground. However, as much as they try to back burn, there are already enough embers floating around in Lebanon to set the country ablaze.

However, as we have reported in the Trumpet, there is a positive outcome to the coming civil war in Lebanon. Regrowth is on the way.