As displaced Syrians return home, others wait and hope for more aid

Sana Khaled, 55, talks to a UNHCR staff member inside her family’s tent in an informal camp in rural Idleb, north-west Syria. © UNHCR/Hameed Maarouf

With more than 7.4 million Syrians still displaced inside the country, a lack of housing, work and services is preventing many from going home, with more international support needed to ensure returns are possible and sustainable.

For the past six years, a single tent has been the only home that Sana Khaled and her large family have known. She has made it as comfortable as their circumstances will allow, with piles of cushions bordering the carpeted floor and bright bunches of plastic flowers hanging from the interior fabric walls. But she still craves the security of a solid roof over their heads, especially during the cold winter months.

“A tent is not like a home – the situation in a tent is difficult,” Sana explained. “You’re always in fear of something. There’s never any stability or safety, but what can we do? We can’t afford to rent.”

Together with her husband, six daughters and three orphaned grandchildren, Sana has lived in an informal camp in rural Idleb in north-west Syria since fleeing fighting in their hometown in rural Homs in 2019. With few services and little support available in the camp, the family survives on whatever they can earn from poorly paid and sporadic agricultural labour.

“Money is very tight,” she explained. “We can only eat if we work. If we don’t work, we don’t eat – this is how it is.”

Hoping for home

For the 3.4 million people who remain displaced in the north-west of the country – out of a total 7.4 million internally displaced people across Syria – the fall of the Assad regime on 8 December 2024 sparked fresh hopes of a return home after 14 years of conflict and crisis.

A recent survey carried out by UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and partners showed that of the 1.95 million people still living in camps and informal displacement sites in the north-west, more than 1 million are planning to return home within 12 months. But this means almost a million others currently see no immediate prospect for return, with most citing the lack of adequate housing and services as the main reason.

Sana and her family are among those who feel they have no choice but to remain where they are for now. After the fall of the previous government, she and her husband returned to their hometown to assess the situation, but what they found when they arrived dashed their hopes.

“I went back and couldn’t even find my house,” Sana said. “I stood there, searching, lost, until I saw it—just ruins, pushed into a pile. Among the rubble, I recognized a piece of floor tile. That’s all that was left.”

She explained the predicament the family now finds itself in. “We are not capable of rebuilding our home, and there we can’t secure a living. We have children. Here, I’m able to work and secure a simple living for them; there, it is not possible. I will only have a desire to return if we … we have a home and a job so we can secure a living.”

UNHCR and its partners are helping returnees inside Syria with transportation, legal assistance to secure identity papers and property documents, and carrying out repairs to homes. But with 80 per cent of displaced families reporting that their homes are severely damaged or destroyed, the scale of the required rebuilding effort far outstrips the support currently available.

UNHCR’s Representative in Syria, Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, recently visited displacement camps in Idleb for the first time following the fall of the Assad regime, where he spoke to Sana and others about the challenges they face and their future plans.

“For those who have returned to be able to stay – and for more to be able to return – there really needs to be an injection of humanitarian aid. Because even though there has been a dramatic change on the political side on 8 December, the economic situation, the humanitarian situation has not changed at all,” Vargas Llosa said.

“Shelter repairs, livelihood activities, helping people to access civil documentation – those activities … we have a lot of experience doing them all over Syria,” he continued. “But because of the limited funding, we have been doing them at a very small scale. If we had more funding, if we had more support, we would be able to scale up those activities in quite a substantive way.”

On Monday, the European Union hosted a ninth annual ministerial conference on Syria in Brussels, Belgium. The event aimed to mobilize international support for a peaceful and inclusive political transition and generate pledges from governments for humanitarian aid, early recovery programmes and other forms of assistance for Syrians inside the country and in host countries across the region.

Creating opportunities

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi told ministers and other delegates that the urgent challenge facing the international community was “to ensure that once people return to their communities, they have enough of the basics: shelter, electricity, water, sanitation, education, work — in a word: opportunity — to imagine a future for themselves and their families in their country.”

That message was shared by Sana, who described her simple but profound hope for the future while sitting in the tent that has been her home for the last six years.

“I want to live long enough to be able to support [my grandchildren] and provide them with a better life,” she said. “They don’t go to school; they don’t know how to read or write. I want them to have success in the future, better days and a better life than the life we have lived.

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