UN Reports Over 2 Million Syrians Have Returned Home Since Assad’s Fall

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.”

Wosornu offered a briefing on the humanitarian situation in Syria in general, with particular emphasis on the lack of basic food and medical goods in much of the country as well as the recent sectarian clashes between the Druze community and Sunni Muslim Bedouins in Sweida.

The Assad regime collapsed in December after a swift military campaign executed by the al-Qaeda offshoot jihadist organization Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). HTS leaders entered Damascus after storming Aleppo and forcing the dissolution of Assad’s armed forces. Assad himself and his family fled to Moscow, Russia, in early December 2024.