Nearly 31,000 Syrians have returned home since the fall of strongman Bashar al-Assad, Turkey’s interior minister said Friday, with the figure rising by about 5,000 in just three days, Agence France-Presse reported.
“A total of 30,663 people have gone back home,” Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya told the TGRT news channel, saying 30 percent of them had been born in Turkey.
Turkey is home to nearly 3 million refugees who fled Syria after the start of the civil war in 2011, with the fall of Bashar al-Assad raising hopes that many would return home.
Yerlikaya said more than 25,000 Syrians had returned to Syria, in Tuesday remarks to the state-run Anadolu news agency, saying they would be allowed to leave and re-enter Turkey three times in the first half of 2025.
Ankara will also open “a migration management office” in Aleppo, Syria’s second city, where most of the refugees living in Turkey are from, he said Friday, without giving further details.
Turkey will also to reopen its consulate general in Aleppo “in a few days,” he added, echoing remarks earlier this week by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Turkey’s Damascus embassy reopened on December 14, six days after Assad was toppled by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) rebels.
Although Ankara denies any direct link to the offensive, it has long had a working relationship with HTS, becoming the first country to reopen its diplomatic mission there.
The embassy had closed on March 26, 2012, a year after Syria’s civil war began.