ISTANBUL: More than 25,000 Syrians have returned home from Turkiye since Bashar Assad was overthrown by Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham militants, Turkiye’s interior minister said Tuesday.
Turkiye is home to nearly three million refugees who fled the civil war that broke out in 2011, and whose presence has been an issue for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government.
“The number of people returning to Syria in the last 15 days has exceeded 25,000,” Ali Yerlikaya told the official Anadolu news agency.
Ankara is in close touch with Syria’s new leaders and now focussing on the voluntary return of Syrian refugees, hoping the shift in power in Damascus will allow many of them to return home.
Yerlikaya said a migration office would be established in the Turkish embassy and consulate in Damascus and Aleppo so that the records of returning Syrians could be kept.
Turkiye reopened its embassy in Damascus, nearly a week after Assad was toppled by forces backed by Ankara, and 12 years after the diplomatic outpost was shuttered early in Syria’s civil war.
Turkiye says over 25,000 Syrians returned home since Assad’s fall
https://arab.news/4h8cx
Turkiye says over 25,000 Syrians returned home since Assad’s fall
- Ankara is in close touch with Syria’s new leaders and now focussing on the voluntary return of Syrian refugees
Israeli strikes killed eight people in south Lebanon: state media
- Israeli strikes killed eight people in Lebanon on Thursday as Israel renewed its evacuation call for vast areas of the country’s south, long a stronghold of Hezbollah
BEIRUT: Israeli strikes killed eight people in Lebanon on Thursday as Israel renewed its evacuation call for vast areas of the country’s south, long a stronghold of Hezbollah.
The Iran-backed militant group, which dragged Lebanon into the regional war on Monday when it launched an attack on Israel, said it had launched missiles at positions in the Galilee area.
The National News Agency (NNA) reported that the mayor of a village in the Nabatieh region of south Lebanon and his wife were killed in one strike, while in a nearby village another strike killed two children and their parents.
The Lebanese health ministry said two people were killed by a strike on a car near the city of Zahle in the east of the country.
There were new strikes on the southern suburbs of the capital, Hezbollah’s main bastion, early on Thursday, NNA reported, with AFPTV footage showing smoke coming from the area.
It also said a pre-dawn Israeli drone strike hit an apartment in Beddawi, a Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli in the north of Lebanon, killing senior Hamas official Wassim Atallah Al-Ali and his wife.
Also on Thursday, Israel renewed its warning to residents of hundreds of square kilometers (miles) of southern Lebanon to evacuate because of military action.
Arabic-language spokesman for the Israeli military Avichay Adraee posted on X: “Urgent warning to residents of southern Lebanon: you must immediately continue evacuating to the north of the Litani river.”
The warning included the cities of Tyre and Bint Jbeil.
On Tuesday, Israel’s military said it was creating a buffer zone inside Lebanon to protect Israeli residents.
The following day, it said troops from three divisions, including infantry, armored and engineering units were operating inside Lebanon.
