Qaa is a territory of Lebanon
"You are now technically in Syria," a Lebanese military officer told me as the convoy pulled over to the side of the road. I had joined their regiment on an anti-smuggling patrol somewhere near Ras-Baalbek in the Beqaa Valley. When the French demarcated the border between Lebanon and Syria in 1923, they drew arbitrary lines with little connection to tribal or ethnic realities on the ground. The result is areas along the border under de facto Syrian control but that are de jure Lebanese territory, and vice versa. The only tangible sign of a border is the river which makes a rough delineation, but it doesn’t follow the official border for long. Half of the cars here don’t even have license plates. [...] Entering the village of Qaa, the last population center solidly in Lebanese territory before the ambiguous border area, we drove through an arch marked by the flags of the twin Shia militias Hezbollah and Amal—yellow and green, respectively. Fixed to every streetlight were a large Amal flag and a solar panel on top. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has been funding solar energy projects in Lebanon since 2006, including a solar farm for farmers in this town. This panel was probably a part of that project. Sustainable energy solutions might work in isolated scenarios, and the farmers are certainly grateful, but the UN’s solution isn’t scalable when Lebanese people are making the equivalent of less than $100 a month. Desperate people aren’t concerned about their carbon footprint.