Soha Alakraa felt the pull of Syria soon after the collapse of the Bashar al-Assad regime. Part of her wished she could return, use her development and humanitarian expertise to help on the ground.
“I have that kind of conflict inside: what is the best choice to make? Is it better to wait a little bit? And if I return, where to?” said Alakraa, who works as an Advocacy and Engagement Coordinator with the Syrian British Consortium. Alakraa just recently received status in the United Kingdom, where she studied for her masters degree. She left Syria in 2016, spending those years in Turkey. She lived there on a tourist visa, and feared rejection every time she had to renew it. The question of whether to go back to Syria was never going to be an easy one.
Alakraa is one of many in the Syrian diaspora grappling with the future of a country she fled during the more than decade-long civil war. The conflict has forced more than 14 million Syrians to flee since 2011. More than 6 million are still abroad, most in neighboring countries, including Turkey, which hosts about 3 million Syrians. Over 7 million more are displaced within Syria, many pushed to leave locations two, three, four times. The scale of the displacement crisis has transformed Syria and its people. It has also transformed the global politics of migration.
The abrupt coda to Assad’s rule raised new questions about the status of those millions of Syrian refugees – and whether the end of the dictatorship might prompt, or enable, their return. Some of this is inspired by the genuine optimism about the chance to build a new Syria, even as many, especially Syrians themselves, are clear-eyed about how uncertain the future is, and about how unpredictable and challenging this process may be.
But some governments have seized on the collapse of the Assad regime to encourage, or push for, the repatriation of Syrian refugees. Some European countries, including Germany and France, have said they are pausing decisions on Syrian asylum applications, potentially leaving thousands in limbo. Austria is offering a return bonus of $1000 to Syrians who wish to return to the country. A humanitarian organization found Bulgarian authorities pressuring Syrian refugees to sign return documents. In Lebanon, which hosts around 1.5 million Syrians, Prime Minister Najib Mikati has called for Syrians to go back, saying their presence is straining his country’s resources. Both Lebanon and Turkey have forcibly deported Syrians before, despite risks of persecution. Assad’s ouster may offer them more cover to do so.
The end of the Assad era has created a politically neat before and after, even if it does not at all match the current realities on the ground – and may only complicate Syria’s efforts to rebuild and remake their country into something more democratic, stable, and secure.
“If you just push everyone back, or you encourage or incentivize them, or pressure them back before there’s any kind of sustainable development inside of the war-torn country, all you are going to do is push that country back into conflict, back into poverty, back into a spiral,” said Jesse Marks, senior advocate for the Middle East at Refugees International.
“Voluntary, safe, and dignified” are the three pillars for broadly evaluating the prospect of refugee returns. Right now, Syria does not fit that criteria. “The situation in Syria is fluid and far from stable,” the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said in a report last week.
Syrian refugees have returned in the weeks since Assad’s fall, but not in massive numbers. About 7,600 Syrians in Turkey have returned since December 9. About 7,200 of the around 1 million Syrians in Jordan have also returned. More than 400,000 people have fled from Lebanon to Syria since September, most of them Syrians seeking to escape Israel’s escalation against Hezbollah and the deteriorating conditions within the country. The Lebanese government has framed these as voluntary returns, but many Syrians were just forced to choose which catastrophe they wanted to endure.
The Syrian communities moving in the days after Assad’s fall are more likely to be those displaced in neighboring countries, as access is easier. Many are likely to be the male heads of household, returning to check on land and property – a trend that has happened throughout the conflict. “But it’s still not clear if those returns are permanent, or people scoping out, you know, whether their homes are still safe or exist,” said Reva Dhingra, policy and planning advisor to the International Refugee Council. “So it’s really a mixed picture.”
The other group of Syrians that are likely returning are those in neighboring countries who already faced the prospect of deportation, or hardship conditions and discrimination, as in places like Turkey or Lebanon. As Maya Atessi, co-executive director of the Chicago-based Syrian Community Network (SCN), said, many Syrians feel as if they “don’t have any other option in this country that I’m staying in or have stayed in for the last several years. It is becoming less and less a place for me to feel comfortable. So I guess I’ll take my chances where I can.”
The more settled and integrated Syrian refugees are in their host countries, the less likely they are to make an immediate return. Those Syrians who reached Europe at the height of migration to the continent, in 2015 and 2016, have now been there for almost a decade. Some are now citizens, some have children born in their new countries, or remember little of their homeland. That hasn’t necessarily diminished the desire to return, or contribute, to this new Syria, but few want it to come at the expense of losing the hard-fought stability they now have.
The fluidity of the situation in Syria, and the diversity and complexity of the Syrian diaspora, mean there is no simple scheme for returns. The United Nations estimates about one million Syrians will return in the first six months of 2025. But, right now, Syria’s de facto government is led by a designated foreign terrorist organization. The country is still seeing mass displacement because of conflict and more than 17 million people are in need of humanitarian aid.
Among the Syrian diaspora, the profound hope post-Assad is blended with caution and concern and exhaustion. “We’ve been in this for the past 14 years, and we lost a lot of blood and sweat and properties and family and sanity,” said Kholoud Helmi, a Syrian journalist and human rights activist, currently based in London. “We’re all traumatized.”
Helmi said she told a friend that she wants to process what’s happened in Syria without the rest of the world intruding. Her dream is to return to Syria, close a door, and see no one from the outside, and let all Syrians cry together and hug each other. She is just not sure that can happen yet.
“I am an exiled person,” Helmi said. “I was forced to leave Syria, and I want to return back. But I want safety and security in my pathway. Returning – in my way – back to Syria.”
Syria Is Not Safe
Ibrahim Efe, a research fellow at the University of Manchester who has examined Syrian refugee policies in Turkey, said, in his interviews with Syrian refugees, regime change was often one of their conditions to potentially return. “With this regime change, right now, there is some possibility,” he said.
But it is not yet clear what comes after the Assad regime. Syria’s caretaker government is led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). HTS broke ties with Al Qaeda in 2016, and though it has distanced itself from its jihadist roots, the United States and other countries have designated it a foreign-terrorist organization. HTS has made overtures to ethnic minorities, but its governing record in places such Idlib is troubling: they have ruled autocratically, and have cracked down on dissent, and curtailed women’s rights.
HTS has made itself the caretaker government, but it does not fully control the country. One million Syrians have been newly displaced in the past three weeks, including in northern Syria, where Turkish-backed militias have battled Syrian Kurdish forces around Manbij. Israel has bombed hundreds of military and weapons targets, but some have been near population centers, like Damascus. The United States has also carried out strikes against Islamic State targets.
Infrastructure across Syria is destroyed; bombings have leveled neighborhoods in places like Damascus and Homs. People no longer have homes or properties to return to. Even if they do, parts of some communities may be uninhabitable because of everything from unexploded munitions to inadequate water and electricity supplies. The economy is in tatters. Food and fuel are scarce. Even if bread is on the shelves, prices are so high, it is difficult for people to afford.
Around 70 percent of Syrians (nearly 17 million people) are dependent on humanitarian aid; northwestern Syria is still recovering from the devastating 2023 earthquake. About half of Syria’s health care facilities are not operational. Rushing Syrians to return will overburden humanitarian services that are rapidly trying to scale up but remain wildly underfunded.
“You cannot treat refugees and asylum seekers as a homogeneous group,” said Mervat Alhaffar, a Syrian public health researcher, currently based in the United Kingdom. There are vulnerable people, elderly people, pregnant women, and children. “Who is responsible for the rights of these people? Their health? Their dignity? Their needs?”
A handful of U.S. lawmakers have pushed to loosen restrictive sanctions on Syria, but right now, Congress seems committed to keeping them in place. That will make any large-scale investment and rebuilding extraordinarily difficult, even with humanitarian exemptions. If many thousands of people return to Syria, it could destabilize the country further, as people compete for scarce resources in places that largely lack legal mechanisms to resolve such disputes. The opening of regime prisons and torture dens and the discovery of mass graves confirm the depravity of the Assad regime, but other armed groups in Syria also carried out atrocities, sometimes against their neighbors. Repairing that distrust will require justice and reconciliation efforts. It will also be difficult for people, gone for years, to easily reintegrate – or be accepted. Efe, the research fellow, said he’s learned in conversations with Syrians still in-country that they feel betrayed by those who left.
“We are expecting this group of people to return to their country, which is not the same country anymore,” Efe said.
What Is a “Voluntary” Return?
Many Syrian refugees are living in limbo day-to-day. A June 2024 UNHCR survey found that 87 percent of Syrian refugees in Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Egypt said their income was not enough to meet their basic needs. About 90 percent of Syrian refugees in Turkey say they cannot fully cover their monthly expenses. A UNICEF report published in 2024 found that 400,000 refugee children remain out of school in Turkey. In many places, including in Turkey, most Syrians have temporary protected status, which makes full-employment, access to housing, and even travel among provinces difficult. Turkey’s economic problems have fueled racism and discrimination against Syrian refugees. This is, of course, not limited to Turkey – in Lebanon, across Europe, in the United States, Syrian refugees have become scapegoats of right-wing, anti-immigrant politicians.
This rhetoric, coupled with the lack of permanent status or protection, often makes Syrians vulnerable – to labor and sexual exploitation and to arbitrary arrests and detention. Human rights groups have found evidence of Lebanese authorities torturing and forcibly expelling Syrian refugees back to Syria. Turkey has also forcibly deported tens of thousands of Syrian refugees, including from camps funded by the European Union, which pays Turkey billions to essentially stop asylum-seekers from trying to reach the continent.
Syrian asylum-seekers endure these conditions and risks in part because the alternative – returning to Syria – has been even more perilous. Assad’s fall may tip the balance for some, but it is, again, a kind of gamble between two unpredictable and deeply problematic options. “The vast majority of refugees in neighboring countries are poor and are pretty destitute when it comes to access to cash and capital, in addition to legal status – I think you’re more likely to see those communities make the move,” Marks said.
But that decision is not straightforward, and Syrians are just beginning to understand what – if anything – they are returning to after Assad. People are learning what happened to their disappeared relatives. They are learning that their entire block is rubble. As Atessi said, for those that may want to go back, she said, it is almost a sign of privilege. “They identify in themselves something that they can go back to – whether it’s that they can continue to have family there that was not displaced, or they continue to themselves have a place to go back to.”
Many understand that any Syria they return to will be unrecognizable. Assad’s defeat has forced a reckoning – with Assad, the prospect of coming home was always theoretical. Now, it is a real – if premature – possibility. “I have a job, I have a world, but this is not my life. I said many, many times that my life is back there in Syria, it is not here,” said Yahya Alaous, a Syrian journalist based in Berlin. “But what I’m suffering now, what is my problem now: what I can do?”
“I don’t know if I will be able to stay there,” he said, of Syria. “I lost a lot of friends, a lot of members from my family. The life for me there is not the same as it was in 2012, 13, 14 – it’s totally different.”
Alaous is now a German citizen, one of the about 160,000 Syrians who were granted German citizenship as of 2023. More than 300,000 Syrians have become EU citizens since 2013. Like Alaous, they have jobs, and businesses. They are critical to certain sectors of the labor force. “Whole areas in the health sector would fall away if all the Syrians who work here now were to leave our country,” German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said earlier this month. They also have laid down roots for their families. Their children are citizens, or arrived in Europe as young children. They are now teenagers or young adults, with distant memories and connections to Syria. Berlin or Vienna is more home than Damascus. Alaous’s daughter was 9 when they came to Germany; she is now 19, a university student with her own life, her own friends.
Yet thousands more in Europe only have protected or temporary status, and these are those most at-risk of potentially having their status revoked. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Syrians “who work here, who are well integrated, remain welcome in Germany.” Of course, this also requires government policies that give refugees or asylum seekers opportunities to integrate and achieve a settled status so they can do so. Freezing asylum applications, which Germany also did, just suspends people, preventing them from being able to find work or enroll in training or find stable housing.
This, really, is the biggest concern moving forward – that the perception of safety, or at least more stability in Syria, will give governments the cover to deny Syrians protection or create such untenable conditions that they will have no choice but to return home. That does not mean they will, either. Depending on how things unfold in Syria, the risks may still be too great. Which means Syrians may once more be uprooted, or remain separated from their families, or just be left waiting, again.
Atessi said that many of the Syrians they work with in the U.S. lived so many lives before arriving in America. The U.S. has only taken in about 50,000 Syrian refugees since 2011, though very, very few were resettled during the first Trump administration. Resettlements began again under Biden, but Atessi said they are now in a “race against the clock” to resettle as many families as possible – and encourage them to seek more permanent status if they are eligible for it.
Because, in speaking to Syrian civil society leaders, members of the diaspora, and experts, it is not that Syrians do not want to return, but they want to do so on their terms – and do not want to risk giving up the safety or stability that they may have fought years and years to secure. Large-scale returns require resources for reintegration and support services. It also requires a stable government, and the same countries discussing or debating Syrian refugee returns have a role to play here. “It seems contradictory for the EU to freeze asylum applications and claim that it is too early to lift restrictions,” Alhaffar said. “This would increase the vulnerability of Syrian asylum seekers and contradict the idea of safe and voluntary return.”
As Dhingra, of IRC said, groups like hers will support Syrians who want to return, but it has to be on their own terms.
“People should be given the choice to remain or to go and return,” Helmi asserted. “It should be voluntary, not forced, because people are freaking out now. Even if they have to send them back now: where should they go?”