A senior United Nations official informed the Security Council on Monday that, according to the organization’s estimates, over 2 million Syrians have been able to return to their homes in the aftermath of the collapse of the Bashar Assad regime in December.
The vast majority of these, 1.5 million, are believed to have been people internally displaced by the war, which began in 2011 and culminated nearly 14 years later. Another 700,000 are refugees from abroad.
According to the U.N.’s International Office of Migration (IOM), over 6 million Syrians left the country in the years of the civil war. Another 7.4 million left their homes but were displaced within Syria, meaning the war displaced over 13 million. The IOM estimated at the end of the war that over 16 million Syrians relied on humanitarian aid to survive.
The statistics were used to encourage member states of the Security Council to invest in humanitarian aid for Syrians and the rebuilding of the country post-war. U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) Director of Operations and Advocacy Edem Wosornu lamented that the prodigious returnee rate “only adds pressure on services — like health, water, education — which already face major gaps.”
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The end of the war and the rule of the Iran-backed Assad regime has prompted hundreds of thousands of Syrians exiled abroad to return home. Some have been pressured by their host governments, most prominently in Turkey, where some local politicians offered free bus tickets to Syrian refugees to leave. Wosornu, the U.N. official, told the Security Council this group totaled about 700,000 since December.
The U.N. official urged countries to offer financial support for these communities — “$3.2 billion through the end of the year” — and expressed appreciation for “steps to ease unilateral sanctions” abroad. Leading the way on sanctions relief has been the administration of President Donald Trump, which lifted sanctions imposed to punish the Assad regime, stripped HTS of its terrorist designation, and endorsed Sharaa personally. Trump met with Sharaa at the behest of the Saudi government in May, described him as “young” and “attractive” and stating that he would move Washington out of the way of Syria’s success.
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