Hundreds of thousands are returning to their homes

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Lerato Khumalo

After the fall of the Assad regime

Hundreds of thousands of Syrians are returning to their homeland

01/19/2025 – 11:59 a.mReading time: 1 min.

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Children play amid rubble in the Al-Asali district of the Syrian capital Damascus: Little by little, many Syrians are returning to their homeland. (Source: Leo Correa/dpa)

The fall of the Assad regime is apparently a reason for many Syrians to return to their home country. The United Nations publishes figures on returnees.

According to the United Nations, around 200,000 Syrian refugees have returned to their home country since the overthrow of Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad at the beginning of December. Between December 8, 2024 and January 16, 2025, around 195,200 Syrians returned to Syria, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) announced on Saturday ahead of a visit to Syria and the region by its head Filippo Grandi.

“I will soon go to Syria and neighboring countries while the refugee agency increases its support for the returnees and the reception centers,” Grandi explained on the online service X.

Even before Assad’s fall on December 8, several hundred thousand Syrian refugees had fled Israeli air strikes in Lebanon and returned to their homeland.

More than 500,000 people have been killed since the start of the Syrian civil war, which began in 2011 with the brutal crackdown on protests against the Assad government. Millions of people fled war and economic and humanitarian hardship to neighboring and other countries.

Around 2.9 million Syrian refugees live in Turkey, which shares a 900-kilometer border with Syria. The Turkish authorities are hoping for a high number of returnees given the increasingly anti-Syrian sentiment among the population. From every Syrian family living in Turkey, one member is allowed to leave and re-enter Syria three times in order to prepare for a return to Syria.