270,000 Syrian refugees returned home in recent months
The Russian military says nearly 270,000 Syrian refugees have returned home in recent months, some seven years after various militant outfits started wrecking havoc in the Arab country.
Head of the Russian National Defense Management Center Colonel General Mikhail Mizintsev announced the news in a press conference on Friday, adding that nearly 6,000 people returned to the Arab country in the last week alone, according to data collected by Moscow.
Syria and its close ally, Russia, have been encouraging refugees to repatriate, assuring them that the violence has subsided significantly.
Earlier this month, Lebanese authorities also said that more than 80,000 Syrian refugees had returned to their homeland from Lebanon since July, when the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees announced that an estimated 750,000 internally displaced persons in Syria returned to their homes in the first half of the current year.
Russian jets have been carrying out air raids against targets belonging to the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group and those of other terror outfits inside Syria at the Damascus government’s formal request since September 2015.
The airstrikes have significantly helped Syrian forces advance against anti-Damascus militants, who have been wreaking havoc in the Arab country since March 2011.
Last month, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said almost 88,000 foreign-sponsored Takfiri terrorists had been killed in Syria ever since Moscow launched its anti-terror airstrikes in the war-torn country.
Back in July, Mizintsev reported that more than 6,900,000 people had left Syria since 2011, and 45 countries are currently hosting the majority of them. The Syrian refugees are mostly living in refugee camps in Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and Egypt.
Russia also blames the United States for being responsible for the horrifying conditions in the Rukban refugee camp in southern Syria on the border with Jordan.