Syrians are returning to their country after the fall of the Assad regime. However, the millions who have returned home, some of them after being internally displaced in Syria, continue to require support. The Norwegian Refugee Council said on Thursday that the world is “failing the Syrians who have returned home.”
According to the report, “regional and international donors must seize this unprecedented opportunity to invest in Syria’s recovery and to support the many who are finally returning home, but find nothing but ruins, urges the Norwegian Refugee Council’s (NRC) Secretary-General Jan Egeland, on a visit to the country this week.”
Egeland said, “As I again visit Syria, I see thousands of families returning to their original communities, from within the country and from neighbouring countries. These are people brimming with ideas and hope after a decade of misery. But incredibly, there is hardly any assistance to help people rebuild lives, homes, and livelihoods after years of investments in emergency relief efforts when return was only a dream. The international community cannot fail Syrians now, with recovery so close at hand.”
One of the key data points regarding return relates to people who have returned from camps across Syria where they had been displaced. A total of 800,000 “people having left camps across Syria to go back home, the pressure on areas of return has increased dramatically,” the report says.
However, the NRC's assessments “show that people are returning to large-scale infrastructure damage, an absence of basic services such as education and electricity, and disputes over home ownership. The resulting competition over resources has contributed to local conflicts among community members in villages and cities. Local tensions are being exacerbated by the insufficient services available to those trying to rebuild their lives.”
The struggle in Syria is that the country remains poor and also divided. Turkish forces operate in northern Syria. Israel operates in southern Syria. In eastern Syria, the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces control around a third of the country. The Syrian government wants to unify the country but faces hurdles. It has trouble controlling its own security forces, for instance.
While the US and other countries are supportive of Syria, the country requires a lot of investment. While Gulf countries and Turkey have vowed support, it will take time to build up infrastructure. Many cities in Syria were destroyed during the civil war. The international community is also focused on the conflict in Gaza, which will also require reconstruction eventually.
Egeland said that “across the country, the destruction stretches as far as the eye can see. I met with families who have returned from displacement camps to find nothing left of their homes: no walls or doors, no electricity, no clean water, and no job to be able to pay for repairs. This is no way to return, and this is no way for Syria to rebuild. This is the moment we all have been longing for, when we can support Syrians with the aid and investments needed to rebuild homes, schools, hospitals, and roads. We cannot fail them now.”
Poor infrastructure exacerbating the problem
The struggle facing the estimated 2.5 million Syrians who have returned home is that they need basic services such as water and other infrastructure. They also need to be able to rebuild schools and receive electricity. In neighboring Iraq, there is also a struggle by people to get 24-hour electricity, illustrating the weak infrastructure in the region.
“The displaced people I met in camps in Idlib said they are longing for the day they can return to their communities. They asked, ‘why can you not help us to rebuild?’. I think that Europe, the US, and the Gulf countries would be making an enormous strategic mistake if they do not now invest in solving one of the world’s largest refugee and displacement crises. We in NRC have proven that we can rebuild communities for those returning from both camps in Syria and from abroad. But we have been surprised to see how hard it is to find funding for these durable solutions,” Egeland added, according to the NRC report.
He also noted that recent clashes in Sweida led to 192,000 people being displaced.
“The latest displacement emergency in the south is a stark reminder that safety guarantees and protection for all communities must be at the center of all recovery efforts. People fled as their homes were burnt down, with some seeking refuge in camps 400 kilometers away in the north,” Egeland noted.