BEIRUT: The number of registered Syrian refugees in Lebanon has dropped to below one million for the first time since 2014, the United Nations told AFP on Tuesday.
As of the end of November, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) counted 997,905 Syrian refugees — a vast majority of them women and children — registered in Lebanon.
“The number reached one million in April 2014, and this is the first time it drops below that,” UNHCR spokeswoman Lisa Abou Khaled told AFP.
Numbers were decreasing, Abou Khaled said, as refugees had resettled in third countries, returned to their homes in Syria, or passed away.
From 2011 until September this year, nearly 49,000 Syrians left Lebanon as part of the United Nations’ resettlement program to third countries including the United States, Sweden, and France.
Others left on their own, making the dangerous sea journey to reach Europe.
“We cannot confirm how many returned to Syria. They don’t necessarily tell us, but we know it’s a few thousand in 2017,” Abou Khaled said.
She said the United Nations revised its numbers on a quarterly basis to assess who remained in Lebanon and what support they required.
In December 2016, the number of Syrian refugees in Lebanon was 1,011,366.
In the first six months of 2017, it dropped by 10,315, then again by more than 3,000 between June and November 31.
More than five million Syrians have fled the country’s conflict since 2011 to neighboring Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon, and even higher numbers are displaced internally.
The influx has tested Lebanon, a country of just four million that already struggled with overstretched resources.
More than half of registered Syrians in Lebanon live in extreme poverty, struggling to eke out a living while sheltering in informal tented settlements or unfinished buildings.
Lebanese politicians have increased their calls in recent months for refugees to return home, with large parts of the country under government control but left in ruins.
Syrian refugees in Lebanon drop below one million
Syrian refugees in Lebanon drop below one million
Security officer arrested over Syria killings: official
DAMASCUS: Syria’s authorities have arrested an internal security officer as a suspect in the killing of four civilians in the majority-Druze Sweida province, the local internal security chief said.
Four people were shot dead and a fifth seriously wounded in the incident on Saturday, in the village of Al-Matana, said Hossam Al-Tahan, the state news agency SANA reported.
The initial investigation, carried out with the help of one of the survivors of the attack, indicated that one suspect was a member of the local Internal Security Directorate, he said.
“The officer was immediately detained and referred for investigation,” he added.
Earlier reports said that four people were killed and a fifth wounded by gunfire from unknown assailants as they were harvesting olives.
The authorities had cleared the olive pickers to be in the northern part of the province controlled by government forces.
Sweida province is the stronghold of the Druze minority in the south of the country.
Violence erupted there briefly in July last year, with clashes between Druze fighters and Sunni Bedouin that rapidly escalated, drawing in government forces and tribal fighters from other parts of Syria.
Syrian authorities have said their forces intervened to stop the clashes. A ceasefire was reached later that month.
