More than 300,000 refugees return to Syria since Assad's fall: UN

By AFP

More than 300,000 refugees have returned to Syria since president Bashar al-Assad was overthrown, while nearly a million more people displaced inside the country have returned to their homes, the United Nations said on Friday.

Since Assad was toppled by Islamist-led rebels on December 8, "we've now crossed the 300,000 returns" mark, Celine Schmitt of the UN refugee agency UNHCR told reporters in Geneva, via video-link from Damascus.

Nearly half of them appear to have come from Turkey, which has been hosting nearly three million Syrian refugees.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday that more than 133,000 Syrians who had been living in his country have now returned.

The rebel offensive that toppled Assad put an end to his family's decades-long grip on power in the Middle Eastern country and bookmarked a brutal years-long civil war that killed more than half a million people and displaced millions.

It remains "the world's largest displacement crisis", Schmitt said, stressing that most of those who had fled the war were now eager to return to their homes.

In addition to the returning refugees, she said that another 900,000 people who had been internally displaced inside Syria had gone back to their home areas.

Huge needs

UNHCR, she said, had conducted a survey indicating that a million internally displaced people (IDPs) living in camps and sites across northwestern Syria intend to return home "within the next year".

The survey of 4,800 households in displacement sites showed that more than half to return to their areas of origin, nearly all of them in the next 12 months.

As of January, more than 3.4 million IDPs were living in northwestern Syria, most of them hosted in 1,500 camps and other displacement sites spread across Idlib and Aleppo governorates, according to UN figures.

IDPs in Idlib were especially eager to return home, Schmitt said, warning of populations swelling in formerly frontline areas.

Two communities in Idlib, Maarat An Numan and Kafr Nobol, could see their populations explode from 3,000 people to 130,000, she warned.

"Overall, 23 districts could see their populations at least double, placing additional strain on overstretched services and infrastructure."

Access to housing was expected to be the biggest need, Schmitt said, with the survey showing that while nearly all IDPs said they aimed to return to their former homes, 80 percent said these were "severely damaged or destroyed".

The agency was appealing to international donors to step up and help increase access to basic services, adding that UNHCR had estimated that more than $170 million was needed for just the essentials.

But "so far we are less than 10-percent funded for the activities we want to implement".