Syrians who have returned to Saraqib to reclaim their homes warm themselves on a brazier in the centre of town, 31 December 2024 (Andrew Waller/MEE)
On the last day of 2024, the border crossing at Bab al-Hawa was cold and quiet.
Leaving Syria, a handful of trucks made their way through customs, their empty trailers open to the winter sun. Returning from Turkey, a dozen families waited by the side of the road for a bus to take them home.
The scene looked unremarkable, but for these families it was the day they had been dreaming about for many years.
“It’s indescribable,” said Fadi of the feeling of being back in Syria, his face showing the joy he found hard to put into words.
“We were forced from our homes when the regime and Hezbollah attacked. My house was destroyed and five of my relatives were killed.”
Fadi, 47, is from Qalamoun, a hilly area on the border with Lebanon where intense fighting in late 2013 marked Hezbollah’s entry into the conflict in support of former president Bashar al-Assad.
Since fleeing Syria 10 years ago he has been living in Izmir on Turkey’s Aegean coast. Despite not having a home to go to, Fadi intended to return straight to Qalamoun.
“I’m a stonemason,” he explained. “In Turkey, I worked on nearly a hundred buildings. And now I will help rebuild Syria.”
But the facts and figures point to a more challenging picture than Fadi’s optimism lets on.
Tired of the cold and dirt
Around 6.2 million Syrians fled the country during the 13-year conflict. Since the fall of Assad in a rebel offensive on 8 December 2024, just 125,000 Syrians have returned, according to the latest UN figures.
Inside Syria, another 7.4 million people were forced from their homes, with as many as 1.8 million living in informal camps strung along the Turkish border. Only 37,700 people have left these displacement camps since 3 December 2024.
Amal is one such camp, just a kilometre up the hill from Bab al-Hawa on the western border with Turkey. It was built in 2017 and is home to 1,200 families displaced from the countryside between Hama and Idlib.
Sitting in the weak sunlight outside one of the dwellings of breezeblock walls and tarpaulin roofs, a group of residents described the living conditions.
There are no public utilities, and the meagre public services provided by NGOs have decreased over the years along with the aid budgets of major donor countries.
A child walks through Amal displacement camp in northern Syria, 31 December 2024 (Andrew Waller/MEE)
The camp’s residents have never seen much of the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham-aligned authorities in the northwest of Syria, the same people who now govern the country from Damascus, including in the weeks since they assumed control.
Middle East Eye contacted HTS for comment but had not received a response at the time of publication.
Around them, the hard-packed earth has begun to turn to mud in the winter rains. There is no sewerage system and waste water from the tents runs through shallow, open channels cut into the ground.
“We are tired of the cold and the dirt,” said Haloum Hamdou, 55, who fled her home six years ago. “There has been no heating for four years. We have even burned plastic chairs just to stay warm.”
Haloum and her neighbours all agree that if they had homes to return to, they would leave the camp as soon as they could.
'We are homeless'
There are many barriers to return - the pervasive insecurity, a fragile economy and unclear plans for reconstruction - but underlying all these issues is the reality that for many Syrians, like Fadi and Haloum, the home they fled now lies in ruins.
Nowhere is this more clear than the towns along a stretch of the M5 highway that connects Hama to Aleppo.
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In early 2020, this was the front line of Syria’s civil war, as the Assad government, with support from Russia, Hezbollah and Iran, pushed rebel groups back from the highway.
In Saraqib, the buildings are now just concrete skeletons, the signs of life long since stripped away. After capturing the town, Assad’s forces looted it, taking anything that could be reused or sold on as scrap.
At a crossroads in the centre of the town, someone has set up a barbeque and is dishing out grilled kofta and kebabs to the men who have come back to start clearing rubble from their old homes.
Wael Habar, 41, has been living in the village of Taftanaz with his wife and five children since fleeing Saraqib in 2020. He returned the day after the government fell to see what was left of the town.
“We are homeless,” he said. “There’s no water, no electricity. None of the houses have windows or doors anymore”.
Inside the homes, everything has gone. Even the pipes and cables have been dug out of the walls and floors.
Distant prospect
It is the condition of places like Saraqib that Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, the UNHCR’s representative in Syria, had in mind when describing the situation for returnees as “very grim”.
'There's no water, no electricity. None of the houses have windows or doors anymore'
- Wael Habar
Without concerted action from the international community, he said in a statement on X, formerly Twitter, “for many returnees…their new life in Syria will unfortunately mean sleeping surrounded by plastic sheeting.”
In recent years, politicians throughout Europe and Syria’s neighbourhood have talked up the idea of forcibly returning Syrian refugees to their country with increasing zeal.
It is an issue that dominated Michel Aoun’s presidency in Lebanon (2016-2022) and was central to Turkey’s presidential election in 2023.
In Europe, numerous countries had begun to talk openly about normalising relations with Damascus in a bid to declare Syria safe enough for refugees to return.
However, the initiative was based on the assumption of the stability of Assad’s government. Today, the situation in Syria presents a clearer picture.
Years of looting and destruction have left a homeland without homes, where hopes of return remain a distant prospect.
