When you walk into Al Haidari sweet shop in Khaldeh, 20 kilometers south of Beirut, employees will greet you with a smile and free baklawa, but the forced cheer belies a grimmer reality. “We have 70 employees in our branch in Syria, but we had to make up for the huge losses we’ve suffered; this is why we opened this branch [in September 2011],” said Wassim Haidar Ahmad, owner of the shop, who declined to disclose figures about his losses. For 13 years Ahmad’s first sweet shop, in a small shopping center that included a pharmacy and supermarket only a few meters away from the Syrian checkpoint at Jdeidet Yabous–Masnaa, acted as the final stop for Lebanese travelers on their way back from Damascus. Since the start of the uprising in Syria last year, however, businesses like Ahmad’s that rely on the flow of passengers between Syria and Lebanon have
