DAMASCUS – UN refugee agency chief Filippo Grandi has urged more international support for Syria to speed up reconstruction and enable further refugee returns after some 14 years of civil war.

“I am here also to really make an appeal to the international community to provide more help, more assistance to the Syrian government in this big challenge of recovery of the country,” Mr Grandi told reporters on June 20 on the sidelines of a visit to Damascus.

Syrians who had been displaced internally or fled abroad have begun gradually returning home since the December 2024 overthrow of long-time ruler Bashar al-Assad, whose brutal repression of peaceful anti-government protests in 2011 triggered war.

But the wide-scale destruction, including to basic infrastructure, remains a major barrier to returns.

Mr Grandi said more than two million people had returned to their areas of origin, including around 1.5 million internally displaced people, while some 600,000 others have come back from neighbouring countries, including Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.

“Two million, of course, is only a fraction of the very big number of Syrian refugees and displaced, but it is a very big figure,” he said.

According to UNHCR, some 13.5 million Syrians remain displaced internally or abroad.

Syria’s conflict displaced around half the pre-war population, with many internally displaced people seeking refuge in camps in the north-west.

Mr Grandi said that after Mr Assad’s toppling, the main obstacle to returns was “a lack of services, lack of housing, lack of work”, adding that his agency was working with Syrian authorities and governments in the region “to help people go back”.

He said he discussed the importance of the sustainability of returns with Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani, including ensuring “that people don’t move again because they don’t have a house or they don’t have a job or they don’t have electricity” or other services such as health.

Sustainable returns “can only happen if there is recovery, reconstruction in Syria, not just for the returnees, for all Syrians”, he said.

He added that he also discussed with Mr Shaibani how to “encourage donors to give more resources for this sustainability”.

With the recent lifting of Western sanctions, the new Syrian authorities hope for international support to launch reconstruction, which the UN estimates could cost more than US$400 billion (S$515 billion). AFP

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