The UN’s top political affairs official and the deputy emergency relief coordinator briefed ambassadors in the Security Council on Thursday, saying that Syrians have made tangible progress over the past year but warning that the country’s recovery remains fragile and uneven since the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024.
Head of UN political affairs Rosemary DiCarlo and UN Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator Joyce Msuya described how one of the most visible shifts has been the scale of returns. More than two million people displaced inside Syria have gone back to their areas of origin, alongside over 1.3 million refugees returning from neighboring countries. “Two million people displaced within Syria have returned—many after living for years in camps, in precarious conditions,” Msuya told the council.
However, many families are coming back to damaged or destroyed homes and finding limited access to electricity, water, healthcare, jobs, and basic services. These are conditions that leave millions more still displaced and hesitant to return, particularly during the winter months.
Those realities were captured in a separate UN humanitarian account marking “365 days of transition,” which follows a team from the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OHCA) traveling across Syria to meet families who recently returned after years of displacement.
In Jabalya, rural Idlib province, the team met Abdulkareem, who had returned only months ago after being displaced multiple times and living in a tent for more than five years. “When we came back everything was destroyed; no windows, no doors,” he recalled. Some neighbors, the account noted, returned with nothing but the same tents they had lived in while displaced, pitching them beside the remains of damaged houses.
On the political track, DiCarlo said Syria has taken significant steps over the past year, including restoring state institutions, forming a new cabinet, issuing a constitutional declaration, and holding indirect legislative elections in October. She said violence levels have declined notably but warned that inter-communal tensions remain high after years of conflict and repression. “Tragically, these tensions have boiled over in the past year,” she stated, pointing to deadly violence in coastal areas in March, a terrorist attack on a church in Damascus in June, and clashes in Druze-majority Sweida in July that displaced more than 155,000 people.
She also said Israeli airstrikes and incursions in southern Syria have further aggravated the security situation, including a late November operation that killed 13 people and forced families to flee. DiCarlo reiterated the UN Secretary-General’s call on Israel to respect Syria’s sovereignty and urged all parties to uphold the 1974 Disengagement of Forces Agreement.
In December 2024, Syrian rebels ousted President Bashar al-Assad and ended five decades of his family’s rule in the country. The Assad family’s tenure over Syria was marked by numerous accusations of human rights violations, and the collapse of the regime sparked international calls for inclusive governance, the rule of law, and robust humanitarian measures.
The UN continues to support a Syrian-led, Syrian-owned political transition process. International support is framed as facilitative, and benchmarks for political legitimacy is tethered to Security Council-recognized parameters such as Resolution 2254’s “Syrian-led and Syrian-owned political transition” language. The framework is reinforced by Resolution 2799’s express reaffirmation of Syria’s “sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity,” which the UN positions as the baseline rule set against which security developments and foreign involvement are judged.
