UN cites ‘notable trend’ of people returning to homes in Syria

GENEVa: Nearly a half-million people who were displaced within Syria by the war have returned to their homes, a UN refugee agency said, pointing to a “notable trend of spontaneous returns” this year.

UNHCR said on Friday that it estimated that more than 440,000 internally displaced people and another 31,000 refugees who had fled abroad had returned home.

The agency’s spokesman, Andrej Mahecic, says “this is a significant trend, and a significant number” but cautions that this is “only a fraction” of an estimated five million Syrian refugees abroad.

Mahecic said those returning had gone back mostly to Aleppo, Hama, Homs and Damascus, mainly to seek out family members, check on property or benefit from “a real or perceived improvement in security conditions.”

In comments to the UN Security Council this week, the UN envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, noted a recent decline in overall violence.

Mahecic said international diplomatic efforts in Geneva and Astana, Kazakhstan, to help bring peace to Syria after more than six years of war had provided hope to some displaced Syrians, but added that it would be “premature” to link the peace efforts to the recent returns.

“The decisions are very individual and based on people’s own perceptions of the situation in their areas of origin,” he said in an email.

Kevin Kennedy, the UN regional humanitarian coordinator for the Syria crisis, stressed that the Syrian people “remained in grave difficulty,” with just under 14 million of the 18 million people in the country in need of some form of humanitarian assistance.

“That’s 70-75% of the population,” he said.

Over one-third of Syria’s people are displaced within the country, some forced to move many times, while about five million Syrians had fled mainly to Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, Kennedy told reporters at UN headquarters in New York.

He said 4.5 million people in besieged or hard-to-reach areas “are in the most desperate need” of aid.

Both Kennedy and UN humanitarian chief Stephen O’Brien criticized the difficulty in getting food and especially medicine to the needy. O’Brien told the UN Security Council on Thursday that “although the most egregious bureaucratic restrictions are from the government of Syria, we are increasingly seeing other groups operating in non-government controlled areas also implementing procedures that slow or impinge upon humanitarian principles.”

O’Brien said local agreements had led to two besieged areas being removed from the UN list – Madaya and the al-Waer district of Homs.

There are now 11 besieged locations with a total population of 540,000 – compared to almost 975,000 besieged people last November, he said.