Given the fog over the collapse of the Syrian government (which unlike the fog of war, seems likely to thin in the coming week or so), it seemed useful to provide concrete information on one element of how Syria got where it was and what might happen next: the massive exodus of its population. Syria went from a pre-war population of about 22 million to its current level. Various official sources, presumably using data supplied by Syria, have estimated it at around 23 million in 2023.1 That does not seem credible in light of the level of flight, which again from official sources which would not have a propensity to overstate, exceeds 10 million, as we will unpack below.
Many here may recall the much ballyhooed Syrian refugee crisis of 2015-2016, when the Merkel government offered to take in about 1 million. This was one of those schemes that only an economist, or perhaps also a chemist, would love. Syria did have a highly educated population and Germany, a worker shortage. On paper, this could be a good if very messy match, since providing housing, language training (and better yet, some effort at cultural assimilation) and job matching would be a huge task. But neoliberal government have been made feeble by design in undertaking large-scale initiatives like that. So rather than messy, the results fall more in the “cock up” category. And it is seldom acknowledge that the refugee influx has played a large role in the rise of the anti-immigrant and typically anti-war so-called extreme right wing in Europe.
Even with European governments being willing to accept refugees, the influx was overwhelming. Recall that some Greek islands became holding tanks, with observers reporting inhuman conditions there.
A recap of the levels at major recipient countries. First from Politico on Europe:
What a difference a decade makes.
In 2015, when 1 million refugees, many of them from Syria, made their way across Europe, then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed them all, famously announcing: “We can do this!”
Since then, nearly 4.5 million Syrians (nearly a fifth of the country’s pre-war population) have made their way to Europe, fleeing a now-stagnant civil war and an interminable humanitarian crisis. Nearly 1.3 million Syrians were granted international protection in the EU between 2015 and 2023.
From Wikipedia on Turkiye:
As of October 2024, there are more than 3 million registered refugees of the Syrian Civil War in Turkey, which hosts the biggest refugee population in the whole world. In addition, about 75,000 Syrian nationals reside in Turkey with a residence permit.
Wikipedia also points out that there are nearly 240,000 Syrian nationals who have become Turkiye citizens. It seems probable that a reasonable proportion of them also left Syria as a result of the war. Right after the Gulf War, as reported on Australia’s state broadcaster ABC, the middle class in Iraq decamped, almost en masse. They would have the cash and the credentials and perhaps also the connections to leave quickly and have some hope of landing well.
In addition, Türkiye more so that other Syrian refugee destination, has a high concentration in border areas, which would facilitate non-registered refugees living there. The text of a 2022 tweet in Turkish suggests the number of unregistered migrants is large:
‘de kayıtlı ve kayıtsız toplam 5.3 Milyon Suriyeli var.
Türk milletine soruyorum;
5.3 Milyon Suriyeli için ne yapılmasını istiyorsunuz?— Ümit Özdağ (@umitozdag) July 20, 2021
There are 5.3 million Syrians in Turkey, both registered and unregistered.
I ask the Turkish nation;
What do you want to be done for 5.3 million Syrians?
The 20.5% bar is for granting citizenship; 79.5% wanted them sent back. This is admittedly an online poll, hence the sample isn’t so hot. But even allowing for that, there does appear to be strong anti-Syrian-migrant sentiment in Türkiye.
Türkiye has been working on expelling unregistered migrants. From BirGun in 2022 via machine translation:
“In July 2022, a total of 25,781 irregular migrants and 570 organizers, 5,103 of whom were at sea, were captured,” he said.
“The number of Syrians returning to their country has reached 514,358,” he said. “As of today, the number of Syrians registered in our country is 3 million 652 thousand 633 people.”
So 4 million Syrian war-related migrants in Türkiye looks like a conservative assumption.
Now to Lebanon. Again from Wikipedia:
Given the estimated population of Lebanon at 5.9 million, the 1.5 million Syrian refugees make Lebanon the country with the highest number of refugees per capita – with one refugee for every four nationals.
And Jordan, this time from the Carnegie Endowment in 2024:
Over a decade after the start of the Syrian civil war, Jordan still hosts nearly 1.2 million Syrian refugees.
UNHCR estimates there are an additional 270,000 Syrian refugees in Iraq.
UNHCR does not list Syrian refugees as being in Iran. As Aljazeera noted in 2015:
There is one glaring case of a Muslim country that is heavily involved in Syria but has yet to accept a single Syrian refugee, and that is the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iceland, which has a population of just over 300,000 residents, has accepted scores of Syrians, but not a single refugee has been admitted to Iran.
Russia has taken in only a small number of refugees from Syria. As this paper explains, Russia draws a strict line on economic migrants versus asylum seekers, and takes a dim view of the former.
If we take the figures above, including the pretty-sure-to-be-low 4 million estimate for Türkiye, we have:
4.5 million Europe
4.0 million Türkiye
1.5 million Lebanon
1.2 million Jordan
0.3 million Iraq11.5 million Syrian refugees total
Wikipedia estimates an additional minimum of 580,000 deaths in the conflict. Again, compare that to a pre-war population of 22 million.
Even though there is reason to think that some Syrians started to return after the civil war ended in 2019,2 cuts in support to Syria would tend to increase economic pressure and thus departures. Again from the Carnegie Endowment:
At the end of 2023, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) announced that it was shutting down its food program in Syria, which supports 5.6 million people, including those displaced in the country’s northwest. This comes as USAID and the State Department roll out further reductions of at least 30 percent in U.S assistance for Syria, which includes aid for Syrian refugees—a move that is expected to be mirrored by other European donors.
Adding to the stress in Syria before the government collapse, Professor Mohammed Marandi reported in a fresh interview on Dialogue Works that there are now 500,000 Lebanese refugees in Syria.
Some quick observations:
Frist, commentators, in particular Alexander Mercouris, have made much of the fact that Assad repeatedly rejected requests by Erdogan to meet and negotiate a solution to the situation in Syria, despite considerable pressure from Russia and Iran. Recall that Türkiye occupied what it no doubt liked to depict as a buffer zone in western Syria.
Assad appears to have taken untenable position in the face of the arm-twisting of his critically important backers. However, his stance appears less unreasonable if this account is accurate. Note I have not verified the sourcing. From Lavieja in comments at Moon of Alabama:
This is being blamed on Assad for being obstinate in refusing talks with Erdowan, which supposedly could have avoided the destruction of Syria, but it is not the case that negotiation with Erdowan would have avoided this. As Kevork Almassian explains on “The Gaggle”and talk show, to have accepted negotiations with Erdowan, Assad had to accept the precondition that Syria must immediately accept the refugees in Turkey back into Syria. Assad told Erdowan that what was first needed to be negotiated was that Turkiye support an effort to gain agreement from US to return land of Idlib province or Golan Heights, because Syria would need a place to put the refugees. Otherwise he foresaw the further, unsupportable destabilization of Syria, which, having had its oil and wheat stolen for years by US, and the country also having been prevented from rebuilding without a centavo from Turkey or Russia who yet insisted Assad make the deal in the form Turkey wished to impose, as I said –immediately receiving 1000’s of refugees with no place or provision for them. Which Syria could not handle under circumstances and would destabilize it from the start. He had good reason to reject this ‘deal.’
This account also suggests, as would be logical, that Syria and Türkiye were communicating, whether via sherpas or back channels. It is typical for groundwork to be laid before national leaders meet, even very friendly ones like Xi and Putin.
Professor Marandi further contends that Assad could not meet Erdogan without de facto recognizing his occupation of part of Syria.
If the information by Kevork Almassian is accurate, it makes Assad’s repeated rejection of talks with Erdogan seem not like ego or obstinancy, but choosing what he saw as the less bad of two wagers. He could accept a huge wave of returning migrants, which would have put an already-distressed Syria into a tailspin. That in turn would have facilitated another regime-change campaign or re-stoking of the war.
But the fact that Assad knew, or should have worked out, that Erdogan was bent on destabilizing Syria meant Assad should have given top priority to securing his position. Instead, we are told that Assad eased out some of his seasoned commanders and installed cronies.
Second, even if Türkiye tries pushing its Syrian migrants back into Syria, the normal pattern after governments collapse and jihadis or warlords take over is net emigration. 1.6 million Afghanis left for Iran and Pakistan after the Taliban took over in 2021. The two nations have launched programs to send them back. Iraq had large departures over its long war with Iran and as a result of the US Operation Desert Storm, and that pattern continued with the removal of Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War. On a quick search, I have yet to find great estimates, but Wikipedia puts that wave as in the hundreds of thousands. For some color on what typically happens, let us turn to Amnesty International in 2016 on Libya:
“World leaders, particularly those who took part in the NATO intervention that helped to overthrow Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi in 2011 have a duty to ensure that those responsible for the horrors that have unfolded in Libya in its wake are held to account,” said Said Boumedouha, Deputy Middle East and North Africa Director at Amnesty International.
“Over the past five years Libya has descended deeper into the abyss of human rights chaos, amid lawlessness, rampant abuse and war crimes by rival armed groups and militias, and the rising threat posed by the armed group calling itself Islamic state (IS). Restoring the rule of law must go hand in hand with justice for widespread crimes and vital humanitarian support. The world must not fail Libyans in their hour of need.”….
Today Libya is plagued by clashes between rival militias and armed groups and is split between two governments – neither of which has effective control on the ground. A proposed Government of National Accord put forward this week by an internationally-backed presidency council is yet to be voted on by the House of Representatives. Parts of Benghazi, where crowds of protesters gathered in 2011, has been reduced to rubble.
The scale of abuse is staggering. Forces on all sides have carried out hundreds of abductions, taken hostages, tortured, ill-treated and summarily killed detainees, and launched indiscriminate attacks on residential areas in some cases amounting to war crimes.
This pattern has already started:
Made it out of Syria for the time being. Chaos rules, looting, thuggery and thieving. Gets the US Israel stamp of approval because this is what they believe in. Going through the border was a mash of gunfire, infighting and looting from every single shop and market. Terrorists on…
— Vanessa Beeley (@VanessaBeeley) December 8, 2024
Third, let us not forget that the US and Kurds control the oil-rich and agriculturally productive northeast. From The Future Perspective of Kurds Sovereignty Over Northeastern of Syria:
The areas under the control of the Kurdish forces are of great economic importance for Syria. The importance of this issue holds great significance for the preservation of underground oil and gas resources, as well as water resources. Agriculture and arable land are also important for the Syrian government.
Bread is the main food item in the diet of Syrians, and al-Hasaka province in the northeast is still considered as the main reservoir of wheat production in this country. This province plays an important role in Syrian agriculture due to its favourable climate and water reserves. It is considered the “Syria’s strategic material reservoir” and accounts for 36% of wheat production in the country.
So will the Kurds finally win a Kurdistan? The jihadists can’t want that, given the importance to them of this wealthy area.
Things are too fluid to merit giving this idea, or other possible partitioning of Syria much thought this early, even though we must note that Israel is moving apace with occupation.
But we can see that this civil war illustrates, as Lambert pointed out, the long-term consequences of Western colonialists arbitrarily setting up countries in the Middle East, with little regard as to the ethnicities of the various groups within them and whether they had any hope of getting along reasonably well. Despite both Saddam Hussein and Assad engaging in often brutal methods, they also succeeded in tamping down on internal schisms. Even those like Craig Murray, who go to some lengths to depict Assad’s shortcomings, also point out that a big reason he was able to stay in control as long as he did was he was a defender of Syria’s minorities. And like Libya, it’s not hard to see that even though many can legitimately say they suffered under his rule, the next chapter is sure to be worse for the nation.
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1 Some sources provide more realistic figures, as in showing a population decline. But even those are way off in their tally of the refugee flight. For instance, Statista is an order of magnitude low on the number of refugees who went to Europe:
After peaking at 21.4 million people in 2010, Syria’s population would see a rapid decline during the civil war, as widespread conflict, massacres, and destruction would lead to significant fatalities and a mass exodus of refugees from the country, with several million migrating to neighboring Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan, and another several hundred thousand ultimately migrating to the European Union. As a result, the population of the country has declined greatly, falling from over 21 million in 2010 to just under 17 million by 2018. However, as the fighting has gradually decreased in intensity and refugee rates have levelled off, the population of Syria has slowly began to grow again. In 2020, Syria is estimated to have a population of 17.5 million people.
2 The Assad regime was not welcoming to returnees. One assumes a justification was that the refugees were indeed bona-fide asylum seekers, which means opposed to his regime, as opposed to fleeing the chaos. From Wikipedia:
The Law No. 10 issued by Bashar al-Assad in 2018 has enabled the state to confiscate properties from displaced Syrians and refugees, and has made the return of refugees harder for fear of being targeted by the regime.[a] Humanitarian aid to internally displaced persons within Syria and Syrian refugees in neighboring countries is planned largely through the UNHCR office. UNHCR Filippo Grandi has described the Syrian refugee crisis as “the biggest humanitarian and refugee crisis of our time and a continuing cause for suffering.”