Around 400 Syrian refugees and migrants leave Lebanon in sixth ‘voluntary return’ convoy

BEIRUT — Seventy-seven Syrian families, approximately 420 individuals, left Lebanon on Thursday aboard 13 buses, as part of a sixth 'voluntary return' convoy, L'Orient Today's correspondent in north Lebanon reported.

The convoys are arranged by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the Lebanese Red Cross.

The convoy left from Tripoli's Rashid Karameh International Fair, in the latest leg of a program set in motion by the UNHCR on July 1 in response to the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024 and the end of the civil war in Syria. Since then, 1,374 Syrian nationals have been repatriated, the agency stated.

The chartered buses entered Syria through the Arida border crossing in the north and then headed toward Homs and Idlib in western Syria. The fourth convoy had also used the Arida crossing, while the first three and the fifth convoys entered Syria through the Masnaa border post east of Chtoura in the Bekaa Valley.

Some 114,000 people have registered for the voluntary departure program, which involves being removed from the UNHCR's refugee register upon arriving in Syria. However, those participating in the convoys remain a minority. Most Syrians crossing back over the border into their homeland are doing so independently.

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According to UNHCR, from January until October of this year, 294,912 Syrian refugees were either presumed or confirmed to have returned to Syria and were subsequently removed from UNHCR's register in Lebanon.

However, it's likely the total number of Syrians leaving from Lebanon is much higher, considering a substantial number of refugees in Lebanon are not registered with the UNHCR.

As of March 31, 2025, 722,173 Syrians were registered with UNHCR as refugees, but the organization stopped registering refugees — at the behest of the Lebanese government — in May of 2015. The real number of Syrian refugees in Lebanon is estimated at 1.4 million people.

The Lebanese government is aiming to see 400,000 Syrian refugees return to Syria by the end of the year, according to Social Development Minister Haneen Sayed.