Some Syrian refugees leave Turkey for home
The returning Syrians say they can see a future back home. But others say they want to stay in Turkey as the war across the border drags into its seventh year.
A Syrian woman and child living in Turkey wait to cross into Syria at the Oncupinar border crossing, near the town of Kilis, Turkey, June 13, 2017.
Some refugees who fled the war in Syria have decided to return home from Turkey.
Among them are the nine members of the Hekel family who left Aleppo in 2012.
"We hope to go back to Syria when safe zones are established - and when the regime is replaced by another one," said Mahmoud Hekel, a former electrical shop owner.
But others have decided to remain.
Almost 3 million Syrians have found refuge in Turkey during the more than six years of war.
Around 110,000 of them live in Kilis, just north of the border.
TRT World’s Iolo ap Dafydd has this report.
More than 600,000 Syrians returned to their homes in the first seven months of this year, nearly as many as in all of 2016, but they are still outnumbered by those freshly displaced, the UN migration agency said on Friday.
Many went back to their areas of origin to check on property or because they had been in places where the economic and other conditions were deteriorating, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said.
Most of the 602,759 Syrians who returned to their homes between January and July had been uprooted within their war-torn homeland, with the other 16 percent returning from Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, IOM's Olivia Headon said.
The number nearly matched the 685,662 people who returned during 2016, she said.
But an estimated 808,661 people have been newly displaced this year, she said.
In all, more than 6 million people currently remain displaced within Syria.
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