The fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime comes at the end of a civil war, which began in 2011, which pushed more than 6 million Syrians into exile. Turkey, Lebanon and Germany are the countries which have welcomed the most of these men, women and children who fled the dictatorship and the fighting.
Millions have fled Syria. After the popular revolt of 2011 and its repression by the regime of Bashar al-Assad, which left 500,000 dead, many Syrians left their native land. A major humanitarian and migratory crisis, which could experience new developments after the fall of the dictator and the takeover of the country by different opposition groups, led by Islamist rebels. Between returning to the country after, for some, a decade of exile or on the contrary acceleration of departures with the opening of borders, it is difficult to predict how the situation will evolve.
According to data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), at the end of 2023, there were nearly 6.4 million Syrian refugees outside their country's borders, in addition to the 7 .2 million people displaced inside Syria. In total, more than half of the residents have fled their homes since the start of the conflict. From the United Arab Emirates to the United States, the UNHCR lists Syrian refugees on all continents, the majority having however gone into exile in border countries, such as Turkey or Lebanon. This is what the map below shows, centered on the Mediterranean rim and Europe.
Turkey is the country which welcomed, at the end of 2023, the most Syrian refugees (3.2 million, or 3.7% of the total population). Tuesday December 10, two days after the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime, Ankara announced a strengthening of the capacities of its border crossings to facilitate the return of Syrian refugees to their country. “Until then we had a daily capacity of 3,000 passages and we have now increased it to 15,000 to 20,000 per day”announced the Turkish Interior Minister. Turkey, along with Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt, alone host 78% of Syrian refugees, according to UNHCR data.
In Europe, it is Germany which has so far welcomed the largest number of exiles (a little over 700,000, or 0.8% of the German population). The country is located at the end of the Balkan migration route, and has implemented a reception policy to encourage the employment of refugees, in particular with language courses or skills equivalences for certain diplomas. A few weeks before the snap elections in February, a debate driven by the far right is emerging across the Rhine on the future of Syrian refugees, and the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees has announced a freeze on the processing of applications.
Elsewhere in Europe, there were 94,800 Syrian refugees in Sweden and another 58,000 in the Netherlands. France hosted around 43,600, or less than 0.6% of all Syrian refugees in the world. In a similar movement concerning the suspensions of applications in Germany, Greece, Norway, Sweden or Denmark, theFrench Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (Ofpra) also announced that it would postpone the study of the 700 asylum applications filed by Syrian nationals “to be able to make an informed decision in accordance with the situation on site”.
