DAMASCUS: Almost 30 per cent of the millions of Syrian refugees living in Middle Eastern countries want to return home in the next year, following the fall of President Bashar al-Assad, up from almost none last year, the head of the UN’s refugee agency said.
The shift is based on an assessment done by the UN in January, weeks after Assad was ousted by Islamist rebels, bringing an abrupt end to a 13-year civil war that had created one of the biggest refugee crises of modern times.
“We have seen the needle move, finally, after years of decline,” Filippo Grandi told a small group of reporters in Damascus, after holding meetings with the Syria’s new ruling administration.
The number of Syrians wishing to return “had reached almost zero. It’s now nearly 30 per cent in the space of a few weeks. There is a message there, which I think is very important, must be listened to and must be acted upon,” he said.
Around 200,000 Syrian refugees have already returned since Assad fell, he said, in addition to around 300,000 who fled back to Syria from Lebanon during the Hezbollah-Israel war in September and October, most of whom are thought to have stayed.
Returning the roughly 6 million Syrians who fled abroad and the millions who became internally displaced has been a main aim of Syria’s new administration.
But the civil war has left large parts of many major cities in ruins, services decrepit and the vast majority of the population living in poverty. Syria remains under a harsh Western sanctions regime that effectively cuts off its formal economy from the rest of the world.
