Assad is gone. Will Syrian refugees go home?

Millions of Syrians around the world are celebrating the sudden fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime dictatorship and the end of 13 years of civil war.

The war came to a rapid, stunning end earlier this month, after Syrian rebel forces swept through the country and into its capital of Damascus after less than two weeks of fighting.

Now, those Syrian refugees displaced by years of conflict are faced with a difficult decision: whether to return home to a Syria that is free but in ruins or to remain in their host countries.

For many, the decision to repatriate depends on where they now live. Millions of Syrian refugees reside in countries bordering Syria — Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan — and endure precarious conditions in crowded and destitute refugee camps. Others are internally displaced within Syria.

Well more than a million others have been taken in by European countries, the UK, the United States, and Canada, and may want to wait and see what comes next. They may be eager to reestablish ties with family and friends, but hesitant to uproot their families, including children who may have no memory of life in Syria.

Some countries aren’t waiting for refugees to decide for themselves, however, or for Syria to rebuild. Austria, which is home to about 100,000 Syrian migrants, has already announced deportation plans. Austria, Belgium, Germany, Greece, Finland, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and the UK have suspended asylum applications from Syrians, and France is considering similar action.

But Syria’s future is far from certain. The country’s economy is in tatters, inflation is high, and public infrastructure has been decimated. Basic amenities like clean water, electricity, and housing are difficult to find. The coalition of rebel groups that overthrew the Assad regime is led by an Islamist militant group, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which has ties to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. HTS is designated by the US and the UN as a terror group, but has also broken with al-Qaeda and attempted to establish itself as a legitimate actor in Syria.

Today, Explained host Noel King spoke about the plight of Syrian refugees with Amany Qaddour. She directs the humanitarian nongovernmental organization Syria Relief & Development and is an associate faculty member at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

You are Syrian American. Do I have that right? Can you just tell me about your ties to Syria?

My heritage is Syrian. My parents are Syrian, but I grew up in the US my whole life. I grew up in the Midwest.

And where are we reaching you, Amany?

I’m in Gaziantep, Turkey. So for those unfamiliar, it’s in the southeast of Turkey, one of the cities that was the epicenter of the earthquakes that hit last year.

I want to get a sense of the scale of movement that happened as a result of Syria’s decade-plus-long civil war. There were people who left the country. There were people who moved around inside the country. What are we talking about in terms of numbers and where did people tend to end up?

Let’s talk about outflow first. This is a country that has probably 6 million to 7 million refugees outside of the country, one of the highest for those that have been following Syria for the past decade-plus. This is one of the highest numbers of refugees across the world, now probably closely tied with Afghanistan and Ukraine. But for quite some time it was Syria. A lot of these refugees ended up in surrounding countries. And then the rest ended up in many, many places: Europe, the UK, the US, Canada. But I would say the bulk of refugee-hosting countries for Syrians have been the surrounding ones, including Turkey, where I reside right now. And then in terms of inflow within the country, across the various governorates, the majority of displaced communities have been in the northwest. This is one of the highest displaced populations across the world right now.

Within the country, it’s about 6 or so million displacements. And in the northwest, it’s housed about 4 million. These 4 million have come from other parts of the northwest as a result of aerial attacks to civilian infrastructure, hospitals, clinics, schools, marketplaces — for those that have followed Syria’s catastrophic inflection points, chemical weapons attacks, seizures on various cities — so a lot of these people have come from Idlib and Aleppo, essentially just moving from place to place depending on where there have been attacks on civilians. The rest have come from some of the other governorates — Damascus, Homs, Hama. A lot of these people may have been fleeing because of how dangerous it was to reside in some of these other governorates. Some were fleeing forced military conscription, particularly young men of military age. So really, a mixture of reasons. But the northwest in particular, I would say, is really housing the majority of the displaced.

For those Syrians who were forced to flee outside of Syria, what did it mean for the countries where they ended up?

It’s really varied. This has been a microcosm of so many other crises. Over the past 13 years, there’s been a lot of really touching solidarity with the Syrian people. I think people have been so tremendously generous in hosting Syrians in different countries. But then there have also been waves of anti-refugee sentiment, where a lot of countries are also looking inward now at their own economic conditions, their own workforce, their own health systems, if they’re able to actually subsidize these health services for their own populations. A lot of this also changed post-Covid, where countries also had serious economic issues, not just developing countries, not just in fragile settings, but also in more developed countries like the US and many countries in Europe as well.

So a mix of reactions, some of them very good, some of them not so good. What are you hearing from Syrians who were displaced outside of the country now that Bashar al-Assad is gone? Do they want to go home?

I think yes, but there’s a caveat. I think, without getting emotional about this, you can feel the hope and you can see the resilience of the Syrian people across the world right now in scenes of people celebrating in almost every country and real solidarity. I think this is a moment in history, this is a moment in time for people and before discussing what’s next, let’s let Syrians have this moment. Let’s let them celebrate, rejoice. Feel the joy. Feel the pain. Feel the suffering. Feel the loss and the family separation, the detainment, the persecutions. This is a bittersweet moment for a lot of people. And I think it’s really important to let them process all of this.

On the other hand, a lot of Syrians are now either wanting to return or, at a minimum, just get permission to enter the country, to reunite with parents that they haven’t seen for ten years, young men and women that had to leave the country, separate from their families, out of safety or simply because of how much economic deterioration there was. I’m very cautious about what this means when many say they want to return. Is the time necessarily now? No. Is there a firm timeline? I also don’t know. What I would say, especially to host countries is, this is not a moment to exploit asylum policies. This is not a moment to sort of weaponize this critical point in time and immediately start discussing returns, especially if they’re not this trifecta: voluntary, safe, and dignified for people.

This has been a contentious issue in some European countries. Have any European countries come out since Assad was forced out and said, we actually plan to do things differently now?

So it’s been a dizzying few days. I believe Austria has. I am cautious to mention names of other countries, but even prior to this moment in time, a few countries have been looking at their migration policies. Germany has been looking at its migration policies. Holland has been looking. Denmark is really trying to understand what are the conditions in Syria so that they can also reframe or recalibrate their own migration policies and determine, is it safe for returns and can Syrians be sent back now?

If people were to choose to go back, what are they going back to? What does Syria look like now?

That’s really hard. A lot of people, it’s just home for them. It’s just, “I’m going back home. I’m going back to mom and dad or my brothers and sisters that were 5 years old before, and now they’re teenagers.” So many of my colleagues, my team are going back right now and reuniting with family. And it’s so touching. I think a lot of people had lost hope. There was a clear disillusionment, I would say, with the international system. But I do worry that what people are going back to now, the country needs reconstruction. It needs development. It’s been destroyed. So there really isn’t, in certain areas, much to go back to.

That’s not the case for all parts of Syria. Inflation has hit the country hard. And this is also situated within wider regional instability and also major inflation rates in the region. So generally, economic insecurity in Syria and outside, which also adds to some of the push-pull factors for some Syrians that have struggled also outside of the country, especially in neighboring countries, unable to afford basic services, basic amenities. You have decimated infrastructure. So public infrastructure, schools, and very few job prospects. And across the health system — I’m a public health practitioner, so this has been my area of focus for many, many years now — the hospital and health care infrastructure that’s almost completely collapsed in certain areas.

We talked to a young man named Omar Alshogre earlier in the show who’s 29 years old. He said his hometown is the most beautiful place in the world. But he’s been in Europe since he was about 19 or 20. He has a whole life there. And so this is going to be a very, very hard call for someone like this young man. I imagine you’re going to hear those types of stories again and again and again over the coming months and years.

Yeah, definitely. I think a lot of people now are grappling with this, especially a lot of my colleagues and friends who’ve had children that have been born in other countries now. And there’s this identity, where we hear there’s something called Syria that we’re originally from there. What that actually means, they may be too young to process that. They may feel they’re Jordanian, they may feel they’re Turkish, they may feel they’re British. So really thinking about the identity of not only children that were born outside of the country now and that are now teens or tweens, but also some of these people that left right at the end of university or high school. And the majority of their formative years now have been lived outside of the country.

It’s a big decision to move back at this point in time, especially when there aren’t these amenities, there aren’t these services. There’s also a whole generation that has not been able to access education in the country. Where are you able to secure your own livelihood, your own education? Is that going to be immediately in Syria tomorrow? Absolutely not. It’s going to take time. It’s a tough decision then to kind of uproot them all over again, especially when some of the ones in Jordan and Lebanon, they’re on their fourth or fifth or sixth displacement. They’ve started their lives over multiple times. So some also just want stability in any form. And I think it’s just there’s only so much a person can handle.