Syria:

More than 300,000 refugees have returned to Syria since president Bashar al-Assad was overthrown, the United Nations said Friday.

“Since December 8… we’ve now crossed the 300,000 returns,” Celine Schmitt of the UN refugee agency UNHCR told reporters in Geneva, via video-link from Damascus.

Her comments came after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday said that more than 133,000 Syrians who had been living in Turkey had returned to their country since Assad was ousted.

Turkey is home to nearly three million refugees who fled Syria after the civil war began in 2011 and is keen to see them return home.

Assad was toppled in early December in a rebel offensive, putting an end to his family’s decades-long grip on power in the Middle Eastern country and bookmarking a civil war that broke out in 2011, with the brutal repression of anti-government protests.

Syria’s war killed more than half a million people and displaced millions from their homes.

It remains “the world’s largest displacement crisis”, Schmitt said, stressing that most of those who had fled the war were eager to return to their homes.

In addition to the returning refugees, she said that another 900,000 people who had been internally displaced inside Syria had gone back to their home areas, “so in total, it’s 1.2 million people returned since early December”, she said.

UNHCR, she said, had conducted a survey indicating that a full one million internally displaced people living in camps and sites across northwestern Syria intend to return home “within the next year”.

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