More than 50,000 Syrian refugees have left Turkey to return home since the fall of strongman Bashar al-Assad, Agence France-Presse reported on Thursday, citing Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya.
“Over the course of a month, 52,622 Syrians went home,” he told journalists at the Cilvegözü border crossing in the southern province of Hatay.
The number has 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 went back with family members, while another 11,185 returned alone, he said.
Turkey is home to nearly 3 million refugees who fled Syria after the civil war began in 2011.
With anti-Syrian sentiment running high in Turkey, Ankara is keen to see as many refugees as possible return to their homeland.
Turkey shares a 900-kilometer (560-mile) border with Syria and has six operational crossings, one of which was reopened in the last month to help facilitate the refugee 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 percent — of the Syrian refugees in Turkey hail from the Aleppo region, the interior ministry has said.