(Adnkronos) – About 31,000 Syrian citizens have returned to their country from Turkey since the ouster of Bashar Al Assad. This was announced today by the Turkish Interior Minister: “The number of people who have returned is 30,663,” Minister Ali Yerlikaya told TGRT, specifying that 30% of them were born in Turkey. Turkey hosts nearly three million refugees who have fled Syria since 2011. Last Tuesday, Yerlikaya announced that over 25,000 Syrians had returned to Turkey in an interview with the state news agency Anadolou.
Ankara will open “a migration management office” in Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city, where most of the refugees living in Turkey are from, he said. Turkey will also reopen its consulate general in Aleppo “in a few days,” he added. The Turkish embassy in Damascus reopened on 14 December, six days after Assad was overthrown by Islamist rebels from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). The embassy was closed on 26 March 2012, a year after the start of the Syrian civil war.
