More than 300,000 refugees return to Syria since Assad’s fall, says UN

More than 133,000 Syrian refugees who had been living in Turkey now back in their country, says Turkish President

A girl holds a flag out of the window of a bus carrying Syrians home to Homs after years of displacement in Aleppo province. AFP

More than 300,000 refugees have returned to Syria since president Bashar Al Assad was overthrown, while nearly a million more people displaced inside the country have gone back to their homes, the United Nations said on Friday.

Since Mr Assad's toppling on December 8, "we've now crossed the 300,000 returns" mark, Celine Schmitt of the UN refugee agency UNHCR told reporters in Geneva, via video-link from Damascus.

Nearly half of them appear to have come from Turkey, which has been hosting nearly three million Syrian refugees. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday that more than 133,000 Syrians who had been living in his country have returned.

The rebel offensive that toppled Mr Assad put an end to his family's 53-year grip on power and ended a years-long civil war that killed more than half a million people and displaced millions.

Syria remains "the world's largest displacement crisis", Ms Schmitt said, stressing that most of those who had fled the war were now eager to return to their homes.

In addition to the returning refugees, she said that another 900,000 Syrians who had been internally displaced had gone back to their home areas.

She said a UNHCR survey indicated that a million internally displaced people living in camps and sites across north-western Syria intended to return home "within the next year".

The survey of 4,800 households in displacement sites showed that more than half planned to return to areas where they used to live.

As of January, more than 3.4 million internally displaced people were living in north-western Syria, most of them in 1,500 camps and other displacement sites spread across Idlib and Aleppo governorates, according to UN figures.

Displaced people in Idlib were especially eager to return home, Ms Schmitt said, warning of populations swelling in former front line areas.

Two communities in Idlib, Maarat Al Numan and Kafr Nobol, could see their populations explode from 3,000 to 130,000, she warned. "Overall, 23 districts could see their populations at least double, placing additional strain on overstretched services and infrastructure."

Access to housing was expected to be the biggest need, Ms Schmitt said, with the survey showing that while nearly all internally displaced people said they planned to return to their former homes, 80 per cent said these were "severely damaged or destroyed".

The agency is appealing to international donors to help increase access to basic services, she said. UNHCR estimates that more than $170 million is needed for just the essentials, but "so far we are less than 10 per cent funded for the activities we want to implement", Ms Schmitt added.