The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Jordan announced on Saturday, June 20, that more than 200,000 Syrian refugees have voluntarily returned to their homeland from December 2024 until this June.

On the occasion of World Refugee Day, UNHCR confirmed that the voluntary return movement has witnessed a significant increase over the past two years, driven by individual and personal decisions taken by displaced people to end their refugee journey.

UNHCR spokesman Yousef Taha revealed that about 23,150 Syrian refugees have left Jordanian territory for their country since the beginning of this year, including 2,500 refugees who left during the period from June 1 to 13.

Taha indicated that women constituted 49% of the total returnees compared to 51% of men, while the percentage of children reached 41% of the total amount, with about 82,000 children, stressing that the departures continue at a steady and stable pace.

Regional Departure Map

Turkey topped the list of countries from which Syrian refugees returned by April 2026 with about 628,485 people, followed by Lebanon in second place with 609,717 returnees after the fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime, while Jordan came third with 284,016 refugees returning according to regional documentary data.

Data from the Turkish Ministry of Interior showed that the number of Syrians returning through its borders exceeded 660,000 people during the past 17 months, while Jordan's Minister of Government Communications Mohammed Al-Momani announced that more than 200,000 registered refugees have voluntarily returned since the fall of the former regime, stressing Jordan's continuation of its humanitarian role and its continuous coordination with UNHCR to ensure a safe and dignified return in accordance with international law.

International and domestic indicators

UN reports monitored the return of about 1.6 million Syrians from abroad in total from December 8, 2024 to April 2026, in parallel with the return of 1.9 million internally displaced people to their areas of origin, which was led by the capital Damascus and its countryside, Aleppo, Idlib and Hama.

UN data recorded the first significant decline in the number of forcibly displaced people around the world in more than a decade, declining by about 5.9 million people thanks to the pace of voluntary return to Syria, although the global total volume of displacement remains at the threshold of 117.3 million people due to wars, violations and catastrophic climate change phenomena.

On June 20, 2026, the international community commemorated World Refugee Day under a renewed UN slogan "Until All is Safe", to highlight the suffering of millions of people and their right to protection and safe return. The roots of the positive transformation in the Syrian refugee file, which is one of the largest displacement files globally, took root following the fall of the deitled regime in December 2024, removing major political and security concerns and encouraging displaced families to make self-return decisions in line with the basic principles of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and the prohibition of their forcible return.