More than 50,000 Syrians return home since Assad fall: Turkey

More than 50,000 Syrian refugees have left Turkey to return home in the month since the fall of strongman Bashar al-Assad, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said on Thursday.

“Over the course of a month, 52,622 Syrians went home,” he told journalists at the Cilvegozu border crossing in the southern province of Hatay.

The number jumped by more than 20,000 since the previous update on December 27, when he gave a figure of 30,663.

Of the overall number, 41,437 had gone back with family members, while another 11,185 had returned alone, he said.

Turkey is home to nearly three million refugees who fled Syria after the civil war began in 2011. With anti-Syrian sentiment running high within Turkish society, Ankara is keen to see as many refugees as possible return to their homeland.

Turkey shares a 900-kilometre border with Syria and has six operational crossings, one of which was reopened in the last month to help facilitate the refugees’ return.

Last month, Yerlikaya said Turkey would open a “migration management” office in Aleppo, Syria’s second city.

Around 1.24 million — or some 42 per cent — of the Syrian refugees in Turkey hail from the Aleppo region, the interior ministry has said.