MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 24th February, 2019) Almost 900 Syrian refugees have returned to their home country from Jordan and Lebanon over the past 24 hours, the Russian Defense Ministry's Center for Reconciliation of Opposing Sides and Refugee Migration Monitoring said on Sunday.
"Over the past 24 hours, a total of 864 refugees returned to the Syrian Arab Republic from the territory of foreign states: 152 people ([including] 45 women and 77 children) left Lebanon for Syria via the Jaydet-Yabus and Talkalakh checkpoints; 712 people ([including] 214 women and 363 children) returned from Jordan via the Nassib checkpoint," the center said in its daily bulletin.
According to the bulletin, 1,020 internally displaced persons have also returned to their place of permanent residence in the country within past 24 hours.
Russia's Kadyrov Regional Public Fund has carried one humanitarian action in the province of Aleppo, delivering a tonne of bread to local residents.
Syrian engineering units continue mine-clearance operations, the center said. Over the past day, they found and defused 26 explosive devices, clearing 1.9 hectares (4.7 acres) of the Syrian territory.
As many as 83 percent of refugees in the Rukban camp in southern Syria would like to return to their homes in the country, the bulletin says. The remaining 17 percent of respondents are still undecided.
Forty-seven percent of those unwilling to leave the camp cited the lack of documents as the main reason, 31 percent are worried about the housing issue, and 22 percent fear being arrested and drafted into the army.
The center noted that the total number of refugees living in the Rukban camp is about 42,000.
As the Syrian government has regained control over most of the country's territories that were seized by terrorists, it is now focused on creating favorable conditions for repatriating refugees. Moscow is assisting Damascus in this process, along with providing humanitarian aid to civilians and being a guarantor of the ceasefire.
