Syrian refugees preparing to board a truck heading to Syria. (Credit: Mohammad Yassin/L'Orient-Today)
Nearly 400,000 Syrian refugees and migrants have returned to their country from Lebanon in 2025, following the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said Thursday in a message posted on its X account.
"More than 378,000 Syrians in Lebanon have already returned since the start of 2025. Support must continue to ensure these returns are sustainable," the U.N. agency wrote.
The statement came on the occasion of the 12th "voluntary organized return from Lebanon to Syria," during which "families are returning to Homs, Hama, Idlib, the Damascus countryside and Damascus itself, ready to rebuild their lives." This repatriation operation took place from the Camille Chamoun Stadium in Beirut.
In total, around 114,000 people have registered for the "voluntary departure" program initiated by Lebanese General Security, which offers $100 in assistance to each refugee wishing to leave, as well as exemption from fines in cases of irregular stay. However, most returns take place outside of this framework.
There were 200,000 who had returned from Lebanon as of last September, a 50 percent increase over the past three months, according to an agency official. "This number is increasing very rapidly," she noted at the time.
Returning to the country at the invitation of Syria's new strongman, Ahmad al-Sharaa, many are faced with the scale of destruction after the civil war that began in 2011, as well as a precarious economic situation.
Since 2011, Lebanon has hosted hundreds of thousands of displaced Syrians fleeing war and abuses in their country. According to a UNHCR estimate dated March 31, 2025, the number of officially registered Syrian refugees in Lebanon stands at 722,173.
However, the actual number of Syrians residing in Lebanon was estimated at 1.4 million before the fall of the Assad regime, as the UNHCR stopped registering new refugees in May 2015.
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