Over half a million Syrians have returned home from Turkey: Ankara

Some 550,000 Syrian refugees in Turkey have returned home following the fall of Bashar al-Assad last December, Turkey’s Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said yesterday. Almost 2.4 million Syrian refugees remain in Turkey, he said, from the high of more than 3.5 million Syrians who had sheltered there at one point. The UN refugee agency on Friday said that 1.16 million Syrians had returned to the country after Assad’s regime fell on December 8, 2024, and some 1.9 million internally displaced people had been able to return to their homes. According to the UN, more than seven million Syrians continue to be internally displaced, and some 4.5 million refugees remain abroad.