The fall of Assad: an uncertain future for Syrian refugees
Alice Johnson, IBA Multimedia JournalistTuesday 21 January 2025
Refugees in the Atmeh Refugee Camp, 2013. John Wreford/AdobeStock.com
After more than a decade of conflict, Syria remains the world’s biggest refugee crisis. Since 2011 more than six million Syrians have been forced to flee the country in search of safety and over seven million remain internally displaced. The stunning fall of Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime has led many Syrians to finally envision returning home. According to UN estimates, more than 125,000 refugees have already returned to Syria in the hope of building a better future.
‘The fall of the Assad regime presents an unprecedented opportunity for Syrian refugees who fled Syria owing to political persecution to voluntarily repatriate to Syria,’ says John Balouziyeh, an officer of the IBA’s Human Rights Law Committee.
The future of Syria remains uncertain, however. The collapse of the Assad regime in December, after insurgents swept the capital, has created great potential for the crisis to come to an end. Nevertheless, anxieties remain over whether the new leadership, rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), will be able to unite Syria and improve the lives of its people.
Major concerns exist for Syrians over the conditions they will find upon return. After 14 years of civil war, poverty and unemployment are widespread, with 70 per cent of the population in need of humanitarian assistance and 90 per cent living below the poverty line. Basic needs such as shelter, food, water and medicine are not guaranteed, and the threat of ongoing violence persists.
‘From the surveys we have done of Syrian refugees, we think the vast majority of them would like to return to Syria once the conditions are ready,’ says William Spindler, a spokesperson for the UN Refugee Agency. ‘Many of them are still waiting to see how things develop, and some are apprehensive’.
Spindler says that, despite the potential for Syria to become safe for repatriation, the UN Refugee Agency is cautioning countries hosting refugees to be patient and refrain from pressuring them to go back. ‘We need to create conditions inside the country so that refugees can return voluntarily, safely and with dignity and also make sure that it is sustainable because we don’t want people to return only to be displaced again,’ he says.
The fall of the Assad regime presents an unprecedented opportunity for Syrian refugees who fled Syria owing to political persecution to voluntarily repatriate to Syria
John Balouziyeh
Officer of the IBA’s Human Rights Law Committee
In response to the fall of the Assad regime many European countries decided to halt processing asylum claims from Syrians. Germany, France, Sweden and the UK are among those that paused applications while the Austrian government has indicated it will soon deport refugees back to the country.
The suspension of asylum applications raises various legal and humanitarian issues. Under the 1951 Refugee Convention, refugees may not be forcibly returned to territories where their life or freedom is in danger. There is, however, a cessation clause that allows countries to cease the refugee status of individuals when the conditions for protection no longer exist, or a refugee decides to voluntarily re-avail themselves of the protection of their country.
David Cantor, a professor at the University of London and director of the Refugee Law Initiative, says Syrians may run the risk of engaging those provisions if they show an intention to resettle or seek a passport from the Syrian government, although those actions should not be determinative of the issue. ‘There may be a range of grounds on which Syrians have received international protection in other countries – some might relate to persecution by the Assad regime. The likelihood is governments will be thinking fairly hard about cessation for those refugees. For refugees who fled more broadly from situations of conflict in Syria there’s more questions about that,’ he says.
Cantor believes that while it would be premature for governments to cease refugee status generally for Syrians now, he understands why they might be hesitant about processing asylum applications given the uncertainty about Syria. ‘I would have thought that at the moment the sensible thing is, because there’s so much flux, to hold off and see where things go in the next couple weeks, unless the basis of the claim reflects deeper underlying factors,’ he says.
The new regime under HTS says it will respect international law and protect the rights of all Syrians, including minorities. The new leader, Ahmed Al-Shar’a (Abu Muhammad Al-Julani) has stated that he does not intend to move Syria towards Taliban-style rule and supports women’s rights and education. The UN, US, EU and UK lists HTS as a terrorist organisation, because of its roots as an offshoot of al-Qaeda, which it broke away from in 2016.
In Europe and elsewhere, the mass arrivals of Syrians in 2015 triggered a political crisis and is considered a major factor in the rise of populist anti-migrant movements around the world. Alex Stojicevic, Secretary for the IBA’s Immigration and Nationality Law Committee, says the West’s increasingly hardline approach to immigration is likely to make it harder and much more dangerous, for refugees including Syrians, to claim asylum in the future. ‘The net cost will probably be more fraud in terms of identity documentation, people paying more to get themselves smuggled into countries,’ he says. ‘It also means there’s going to be more deaths’.