Date: Dec 23, 2018 Source: The Daily Star Ibrahim: 110,000 refugees went home BEIRUT: Some 110,000 Syrian refugees have returned from Lebanon to their home country in 2018, General Security head Abbas Ibrahim told local news channel MTV Friday. He did not specify how many refugees among the total had returned on their own or through the voluntary trips that his agency has been organizing in coordination with Syrian authorities since the summer. In November, General Security said that 87,670 Syrian refugees had returned since July, and that 7,670 had done so through the trips organized by the agency. In September, Ibrahim put the total number of returnees at 50,000. General Security’s numbers have been much higher than other estimates, including those from United Nations refugee agency the UNHCR and Lebanon’s caretaker minister of state for refugee affairs, in the low tens of thousands. Ibrahim told MTV that his agency would continue organizing voluntary refugee returns in 2019 and that political conditions in Syria and the wider Middle East would also enable more Syrians to go home. Ibrahim said an initiative announced by Russia earlier this year to facilitate large-scale returns of refugees had likely not taken off because of a lack of funding. The project reportedly would have required international cooperation, with the U.S. and Europe expected to chip in for the reconstruction of the war-torn country. Soon after the Russian initiative was announced, Moscow said that over 1.7 million Syrian refugees would be able to return to Syria under the plan. That included a possible 890,000 from Lebanon, with most of the others coming from Turkey and Europe. About 30,000 Syrians who fought in Syria seek to remain in Lebanon, Moscow said. Several Lebanese officials have questioned Russia’s intentions in assisting with the return of refugees. Caretaker Minister of State for Refugee Affairs Mouin Merehbi said the initiative was “a dream” that Russia had been unable to make reality. According to the UNHCR, roughly 950,000 Syrian refugees are registered in Lebanon, down from over 1 million from when the agency stopped registering new arrivals in 2015. But Lebanese officials have said that as many as 1.5 million Syrian refugees could still be in the country, citing a high number of unregistered individuals. A statement from President Michel Aoun’s office Friday put the number at 1.5 million refugees. During a meeting with a British delegation at Baabda Palace, Aoun stressed the important role the international community has to play in solving the refugee crisis in Lebanon and preventing any further delay in returns. “This issue [of Syrian displacement in Lebanon] has decreased employment, [contributed] to financial and social crises. “Most of the refugees that came [because they did not have] food during the war can now return, especially since most refugees came from areas that did not experience clashes,” the statement said. The Syrian war has displaced almost half of Syria’s 23 million people, including an estimated 5.6 million who are refugees abroad, the U.N. refugee agency has previously reported. The UNHCR has said that up to 250,000 refugees could return to Syria from Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq in 2019.