More than 133,000 Syrians living in Turkey have returned home in the three months since Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad was toppled, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday.
"Since December 8, more than 133,000 Syrians voluntarily returned to their homeland. As stability takes hold in Syria, this figure will go up. We will not force anyone, but if our brothers and sisters would like to return, we will facilitate this journey," he said.
Turkey is home to nearly three million refugees who fled Syria after the civil war began in 2011 and is keen to see them return home.
The country shares a 900-kilometer (560-mile) border with Syria, along which there are six operational crossings.
Around 1.24 million of the Syrian refugees in Turkey hail from the northwestern Aleppo region, the interior ministry has said.
On February 18, the UN said it estimated that more than one million people had returned to their homes in Syria, of which more than 800,000 were those who had been internally displaced while another 280,000 had returned from abroad.
With AFP
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