Displaced Syrians Rush to Return Home

When Abdo Bakri returned to his hometown in northwestern Syria on Saturday after more than five years roaming the area in search of safe shelter for his family during the country’s civil war, he did not know what he would find.

Driving along the highway — retracing some of the same routes he, his wife and their children took years ago to flee their home in the town of Saraqib, which became an opposition stronghold soon after the war began — he passed families taking photos and selfies on an abandoned military tank by the side of the road.

In the back seat, his son sat listening to his father talk, his own memories of their city just a faint hint.

“Thank God Saraqib has returned to us and we will return and rebuild it, the city that the Assad regime destroyed,” Mr. Bakri said.

When he arrived to the home he had worked years to build for his family, a wave of relief spread over him. It was still standing. The doors and windows had been wrenched off, but the walls and roof remained.

He got out of his vehicle and knelt in a prayer of thanks, pressing his forehead against the cool concrete of his home’s entrance.

As rebels swept through towns and cities across Syria over the last nearly two weeks on their push to the capital, Damascus, displaced people followed close behind. Roads and highways where tanks and armored vehicles had driven just a day earlier were packed with bumper-to-bumper traffic on Monday as thousands of Syrians who had been displaced inside their country for years tried to return home. They drove in cars and trucks piled high with the belongings they had accumulated — mattresses and bags of clothes and blankets.

Many Syrians are like Mr. Bakri and his family. More than holding a sense of nationalism, they are deeply attached to their specific cities, towns and neighborhoods.

Mr. Bakri, a rescuer with the White Helmets — an emergency organization based in opposition-held areas in Syria — said he had never given up hope of seeing Saraqib again.

“Now Saraqib has returned to us, the beautiful,” said the father of four, including a 10-month- old. “Saraqib is like one big family.”

The war had forced them to flee again and again, he said, at times the entire family on the back of a motorcycle, but they tried to stay as close as possible. Still, they felt like foreigners in their own country.

“We always had hope: Oh God, just before I die, let us see Saraqib and let us live there for 10 days, and we’ll be happy and we’ll consider that we were victorious over the oppression,” he said.

When millions of Syrians were forced to make the wrenching decision to leave their homes and lands throughout the war, many felt stateless and exiled — even as they were sometimes mere miles away.

“We were like fish out of water when we left,” said Yasmeen Ali Armoosh, 30, speaking on Thursday from the dilapidated home she and her family have rented for years in the town of Binnish, 10 miles from their home in Saraqib, both in Idlib Province. “We felt suffocated.”

Ms. Armoosh and her family, who had withstood years of airstrikes from Syrian and Russian warplanes, had refused to leave their home. But once forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad captured Saraqib in 2020, Ms. Armoosh’s family fled — fearful, she said, of what living under a brutal dictatorship again could mean.

The 13-year civil war in Syria caused one of the “largest displacement crises in the world,” according to the United Nations. Some 7.2 million Syrians were displaced inside the country, mostly to rebel-held areas, while more than six million fled to other nations and became refugees.

The rebel offensive that ultimately drove President al-Assad from power on Sunday has prompted an untold number to start making their way back, crowding some border crossings with neighboring countries.

And the rush of refugees to return home could grow as at least three European countries — Germany, Austria and Sweden — paused their asylum decisions for people coming from Syria until the situation on the ground becomes clearer, they announced on Monday. Asylum decisions are based partly on whether people would be endangered were they returned to their home country. It was not immediately clear how many Syrians would be affected. Deportations for Syrians who have been convicted of crimes in Germany will also be suspended until the situation becomes clearer, the foreign ministry said.

In an interview last week, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the Islamist leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the rebel group that led the offensive that ousted Mr. al-Assad, said that the fate of the millions of displaced Syrians was a driving force for starting the offensive.

Earlier this year, demonstrations were held against Mr. Al-Jolani’s authoritarian rule, while other protesters demanded that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and other antigovernment rebel factions launch a battle against the Syrian government to take back their towns and cities in Idlib province and elsewhere in Syriato enable them to return home.

“In the liberated areas,” Mr. al-Jolani said, referring to those held by the rebels, “almost a third of the people who lived in these areas, a third of them live in tents. And encampments are not suitable for people to live in for years.”

He spoke on Wednesday, as rebel fighters intensified their push to take the central city of Hama. Over the next six months, he said at the time, their offensive would enable more than a million people to return home.

“People need to return home,” he added. “Today we are striving for there not to be one tent left in this area.”

By Sunday though, with Mr. al-Assad having fled and much of the country under rebel control, many more millions could return to where they had lived.

In Binnish for about four years, Ms. Armoosh, a teacher, was only around 10 miles from her hometown, but she said it felt like living in another country.

On Nov. 29, she was feverishly messaging with dozens of friends about the rebel advance. One friend wrote, “Yasmeen, they liberated Saraqib, you’re finally returning home.”

The day after, as rebels pushed on from Saraqib toward the city of Aleppo, Ms. Armoosh went with her brother and two friends to see what had become of their hometown.

Driving on the road leading to Saraqib was a familiar comfort, she said.

Ms. Armoosh was relieved to find her house was still standing — many homes were destroyed during the war — but government soldiers had used it as some kind of outpost, she said. Pro-Assad graffiti was written on a wall, and the floors were littered with bullet casings, she added.

Ms. Armoosh and her family will need to work to make it habitable again, but it is still home.

“A person’s homeland is where their home is, where their friends are,” she said.

Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting.