What’s preventing Syrian refugees’ return home? Distrust of Assad.
June 27, 2023
By Taylor Luck and Dominique Soguel
Ramtha, Jordan and Basel, Switzerland- Some mornings Bassam al-Masri walks to a farm at the edge of Jordan’s northern border town of Ramtha and looks across the Yarmuk River valley into Syria. On a clear day, he can see the mosque where he preached and the remains of his house in Daraa 7 miles away.
Although the Syrian refugee could walk to his hometown in two hours, it remains, for him, as unreachable as ever – no matter the recent reconciliation between Arab states and President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and the resulting promises of safe returns.
“The only guarantee that we could return safely is for Assad to go,” says Mr. Masri, among millions of Syrians living in the Middle East and Europe who long to return home but fear they cannot. “As long as he is present, we are permanently separated from our homeland. He cannot be trusted.”
In interviews and polls, Syrian refugees say they have seen nothing that convinces them to trust Mr. Assad in the wake of the Arab League’s early May decision to reinstate Syria.
Syria’s membership had been suspended in 2011 following Mr. Assad’s brutal crackdown on dissent in the early days of Syria’s civil war, a conflict that left hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced. And a few refugees had dared hope that the Arab world reconciliation would be followed by concrete measures to rebuild trust.
But so far not even the “bare minimums” that they would expect are on the table: a general amnesty, reconciliation, transparency on the fate of the missing, and guarantees of a safe return for those who fled.
Without such measures, the vast majority of Syrians in exile say returning home is impossible: Any guarantee by Mr. Assad – regarded as a serial promise-breaker who has shown no contrition for the systematic destruction, torture, and killings under his command – cannot be trusted.
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