Displaced Syrians who have returned home face a fragile future, says UN refugees chief

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said Friday that more than two million Syrian refugees and internally displaced people have returned home since the fall of the government of Bashar Assad in December.

Speaking during a visit to Damascus that coincided with World Refugee Day, Grandi described the situation in Syria as “fragile and hopeful” and warned that the returnees may not remain if Syria does not get more international assistance to rebuild its war-battered infrastructure.

“How can we make sure that the return of the Syrian displaced or refugees is sustainable, that people don’t move again because they don’t have a house or they don’t have a job or they don’t have electricity?” Grandi asked a small group of journalists after the visit, during which he met with Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shibani and spoke with returning refugees.

“What is needed for people to return, electricity but also schools, also health centers, also safety and security,” he said.

Syria’s near 14-year civil war, which ended last December with the ouster of former President Bashar Assad in a lightning rebel offensive, killed nearly half a million people and displaced half the country’s pre-war population of of 23 million.

Grandi said that 600,000 Syrians have returned to the country since Assad’s fall, and about another 1.5 million internally displaced people returned to their homes in the same period.

However, there is little aid available for the returnees, with multiple crises in the region — including the new Israel-Iran war — and shrinking support from donors. The UNHCR has reduced programs for Syrian refugees in neighboring countries, including healthcare, education and cash support for hundreds of thousands in Lebanon.

“The United States suspended all foreign assistance, and we were very much impacted, like others, and also other donors in Europe are reducing foreign assistance,” Grandi said, adding: “I tell the Europeans in particular, be careful. Remember 2015, 2016 when they cut food assistance to the Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan, the Syrians moved toward Europe.”

Some have also fled for security reasons since Assad’s fall. While the situation has stabilized since then, particularly in Damascus, the new government has struggled to extend its control over all areas of the country and to bring a patchwork of former insurgent groups together into a national army.

There have also been outbreaks of violence, notably in March, when hundreds of civilians, most of them from the Alawite minority to which Assad belongs, were killed in revenge attacks after clashes broke out between pro-Assad armed groups and government security forces on the Syrian coast. Some 40,000 new refugees fled to Lebanon following that violence.

Grandi said the UNHCR has been in talks with the Lebanese government, which halted official registration of new refugees in 2015, to register the new refugees and “provide them with basic assistance.”

“This is a complex community, of course, for whom the chances of return are not so strong right now,” he said. He said he had urged the Syrian authorities to make sure that measures taken in response to the attacks on civilians “are very strong and to prevent further episodes of violence.”

The Israel-Iran war has thrown further fuel on the flames in a region already dealing with multiple crises. Grandi noted that Iran is hosting millions of refugees from Afghanistan who may now be displaced again.

The U.N. does not yet have a sense of how many people have fled the conflict between Iran and Israel, he said.

“We know that some Iranians have gone to neighboring countries, like Azerbaijan or Armenia, but we have very little information. No country has asked for help yet,” he said. “And we have very little sense of the internal displacement, because my colleagues who are in Iran – they’re working out of bunkers because of the bombs.”

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Associated Press staff writer Abby Sewell in Beirut contributed to this report.