The pinnacle of the U.N. migration company stated she was reassured by commitments she heard from Syria’s new caretaker authorities in conferences in Damascus, because the nation seeks to rebuild after greater than a half-century of rule beneath the Assad household.
Amy Pope, director-general of the Worldwide Group for Migration, stated in a cellphone interview Wednesday that Syria’s new leaders “acknowledge the job they’ve forward of them is big and that they want the help of the worldwide group.”
IOM estimates about 100,000 individuals — many trying to return to their former houses — have entered Syria from neighboring nations since Dec. 8, the day former President Bashar Assad fled the nation as opposition fighters swarmed into the capital.
“We’re additionally seeing about 85,000 individuals come out” into Lebanon by way of established border crossing factors, she stated. “It’s a tough determine: There’s definitely individuals who cross informally and they also’re not counted.”
Most of these discovered to be leaving are Shiite Muslims, she stated. The armed teams who took management of Syria are primarily from the nation’s majority Sunni Muslim group, together with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the terrorist-designated group that led the coalition of armed opposition teams that drove Assad from energy and into asylum in Russia.
“There’s no query to me that at this second in time, they’re on the lookout for methods to make this work, to be extra inclusive, to construct partnerships throughout the worldwide group, to construct partnerships with different governments,” Pope stated of the caretaker authorities. “It’s simply going to be a query of whether or not they can ship.”
IOM stated Pope was one of many first heads of a U.N. company to go to Syria since Assad’s ouster, and he or she met with unspecified members of the caretaker authorities on Tuesday, in addition to U.N. officers and advocacy teams.
She reaffirmed the IOM’s dedication to Syria. The group has been offering help to individuals within the nation since 2014 and is searching for $30 million in pressing assist funding for the subsequent 4 months to attempt to assist almost 685,000 individuals within the northwest of the nation.
