Turkish Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said on Friday that more than 30,600 Syrians have returned to their country after the fall of the regime of Bashar al Assad, who fled to Russia on December 8 in the face of the advance of the rebels, led by the jihadist group Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS).
Yerlikaya detailed in statements to the television channel TGRT that 30,663 Syrians have returned to Syria since the fall of Al Assad. In total, there are more than 4.1 million refugees in Turkey, of which 2.9 million are Syrian. Most of them live in cities such as Istanbul or Gaziantep.
He also put the number of Syrians who have left Turkey voluntarily since 2017 at 768,912. The Interior Minister also said that the Turkish consulate in the Syrian city of Aleppo will open “in a few days.”
The offensive in Syria, launched on November 27 from the province of Idlib, allowed jihadists and rebels to take the capital, Damascus, and put an end to the regime of the Al Assad family, in power since 1971 – first with Hafez al Assad (1971-2000) and later with his son, Bashar – in the face of a constant withdrawal of government troops, backed by Russia and Iran.
