Report
Syria's return movement is one of the largest of this century, and it is unfolding faster than housing, services, and livelihoods can be rebuilt to receive it. Since December 2024, more than 3.5 million Syrians have returned, and returnees now make up roughly 14% of the population. Drawing on 425 returnee surveys, 31 key informant interviews, and 15 focus group discussions across seven governorates, this report finds that hope is bringing Syrians home, but structural gaps in services, documentation, housing, and livelihoods are what determine whether that return holds.
Not all of these returns are fully voluntary. Many were driven as much by the collapse of conditions in displacement, ending aid, precarious legal status, unaffordable rent, as by confidence in what awaited them at home. The March 2026 escalation in Lebanon made this dynamic acute: more than 400,000 people crossed into Syria in its wake, and only 27% said they intended to stay permanently.
Ninety-one percent of returnees arrived to find essential services missing. Seventy-one percent are living in damaged housing. The single greatest barrier to reintegration was not social division but insufficient services for all community members, a finding that points directly to the gap between the scale of return and the scale of investment. That gap falls hardest on women-headed households, children raised in displacement, people with disabilities, and families without documentation.
The new report calls for:
- Area-based service delivery. Invest in water, electricity, schools and roads that reach entire communities, not households selected by displacement status. It is the most effective way to meet need while reducing the competition that erodes trust.
- Conditions-based camp closure. Sequence camp closures and large-scale return facilitation behind the restoration of minimum services, tied to verified conditions in areas of return rather than fixed deadlines.
- Sustained, flexible, multi-year funding. Reintegration unfolds over years. Short-term, project-bound financing cannot build the systems that make return durable.
- Resourced documentation and HLP systems. With 4.1 million people needing housing, land and property support, fast-track legal mechanisms and decentralized civil registration are essential, particularly for women establishing independent legal identity.
- Investment in social cohesion and MHPSS. Peacebuilding and psychosocial support remain absent from most portfolios despite being identified as a critical need in all seven governorates studied.
