“Don’t come back, we want to leave,” is the advice Syrians residing in their home country offer to refugees abroad.
A report by the Syrian Association for Citizens’ Dignity (SACD) found that more and more people were seeking to leave regions held by the regime.
The 83-page report includes the results of 533 interviews held with Syrians residing in those regions. “A large number of Syrians feel unsafe, with the perception of safety heavily tied to the area’s perceived threat to the regime,” said the report.
“People forced to return to regime control from displacement or through ‘reconciliation’ do not feel safe, with significantly higher levels of fear in their daily lives.”
“Their feeling of insecurity is being informed by events that were directly witnessed or experienced. Some 50% of people in the [president Bashar] Assad-controlled areas don’t feel safe, including those who never left; 67% of returnees from outside Syria don’t feel safe, and those in the reconciliation areas fear worst with 94% saying they don’t feel safe. Most cite the security authorities’ grip and fear of rampant insecurity and crime as their reasons for feeling safe.”
“That said, there are no safe areas, with some of the more practical measures of safety showing that security is poor everywhere, because it’s due to security policies by the same authority,” noted the report.
“The reconciliation areas present the worse deterioration in the sense of insecurity amongst survey respondents,” it found. “While 74 percent of participants in the SACD’s 2019 survey reported not feeling safe in their areas, this figure increased to 94 percent in the 2020 survey.”
“Surprisingly, the same trend was observed in areas controlled by the regime since 2011, where perceptions of insecurity jumped from 39 percent in 2019 to 51 percent in 2020. These numbers clearly indicate that the reconciliation areas have failed to provide security to citizens, and that the regime’s security policies and general practices are weakening the sense of security amongst Syrians,” it added.
“The intention to leave regime-controlled areas specifically in reconciliation areas and areas controlled since 2011 has noticeably increased. In the case of reconciliation areas, 48 percent of survey participants in 2019 had the intention of leaving regime-controlled areas, while the percentage increased to 68 percent in 2020. In areas controlled by the regime since 2011, the percentage went up from 23 percent in 2019 to 47 percent in 2020.”
“These numbers are in line with those detailed in a March 2021 Norwegian Refugee Council report, which predicted that Syria will experience the displacement of another 6 million refugees in the next decade if the conflict continues.”
SACD member Houda Atassi said the establishment of a secure environment for all Syrians should be a main issue in the political process.
SACD trustee Fadi Nezhat said regime and Russian guarantees mean nothing on the ground, as arrest campaigns and forced disappearances of people are still rampant.
