DAMASCUS. Jan 28 (Interfax) - More than 647,000 Syrian citizens who left Syria during the military hostilities there have returned since July 2018, and most arrived from Lebanon and Jordan, Rear Adm. Vyacheslav Sytnik, deputy head of the Russian Center for Reconciliation of Opposing Sides in Syria, told reporters in Damascus on Thursday.
"A total of 647,285 people have returned from the territories of foreign states since July 18, 2018, including 252,037 from Lebanon and 395,298 from Jordan," Sytnik said.
Most refugees are women and children, he said.
A total of 413 refugee accommodation facilities have now been deployed in Syria, Sytnik said. They are located in populated areas the least hit by the war and are intended for a total of 1.5 million people, he said.
Sytnik also said that the families of Beduin tribes are continuing to return to the places where they used to live in southern Syria before the war. They began returning in October 2020. Seventy-seven Beduin families comprising 847 people in all have now returned to their homes.
The number of wanted citizens, whose status is regulated by a special commission which has been working in Syria's Daraa province since December 2020, has reached 2,000, which exceeds the planned figures three times.
"The process of regulating citizens' status is taking place in the Daraa province. As a result of the work done, the status of more than 2,000 people, including more than 100 defectors, has now been regulated, which is three times more than was planned in December 2020," Sytnik said.
Work on regulating the status of citizens, in which servicemen, army, and police defectors and other wanted persons are given documents and are removed from the lists of wanted persons, has increased people's trust in the local authorities, he said.
The first commission was created on December 1, 2020, in Syria's Daraa province. It comprised local authorities, security officials, and military tribunal officials.
Local Self-Government Minister Hussein Mahluf told reporters, in turn, that the Syrian authorities are working in parallel on restoring houses for refugees and launching housing and utilities infrastructure in them. At the same time, Mahluf said some refugee camps are in territories controlled by militants, and people are forced to live in poor conditions there.
"We see disease, hunger, the inability to meet the most common needs. The Syrian government is doing a lot of work to meet its citizens: checkpoints have opened in Idlib, and returning residents are being provided with all possible assistance. Terrorist formations are increasing pressure on refugees; they are preventing them from returning to the liberated territories," he said.