The Qatari Red Crescent and Türkiye’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) on Tuesday inaugurated more than 1,000 new homes for displaced people in northern Syria.
Mohammad Salah Ibrahim of the Red Crescent said the Qatari-financed village of 1,136 new homes was "the largest village opened to date in northern Syria."
The homes are in 143 two-story buildings in the village in Aleppo province, which Ibrahim said also has a 16-room health clinic, a school for 500 pupils, a mosque and shops.
More than half a million people have been killed and millions more displaced in Syria's civil war, which began in 2011 after the Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests with unexpected ferocity.
A deadly earthquake in February 2023 also killed about 6,000 people in the country and 53,000 people in bordering southeastern Türkiye.
Qatar has financed several building projects in northern Syria, and Türkiye launched a project in May last year that includes the construction of 240,000 new homes at 13 sites in an effort to rehouse one-third of the 3 million Syrians who had fled across the border.
Ammar Shehadeh, 37, had been living in a camp since fleeing Aleppo during the Syrian conflict and was one of the first to get a new home.
He had been living in a tent city on the Turkish border until now.
Thanking the Qatari Red Crescent and Turkish nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) for their help, Shehadeh said he hoped that "health, education and other services would be available."
However, he also told Agence France-Presse (AFP): "I hope our stay here will not be permanent."
Another displaced man, Abu Mohammad Najjar, also said his new apartment "will not replace either my home or the land I left behind in Aleppo."
Türkiye is home to some 3.7 million Syrians who fled persecution and brutality in their country. In Syria’s north, Ankara helped Assad’s opposition sustain moderate ground against regime forces while starting in 2016, Turkish counterterrorism operations, Euphrates Shield, Olive Branch and Spring Shield liberated swathes of territory from terrorist groups like the PKK and its U.S.-backed Syrian branch, the YPG, and enabled the safe resettlement of civilians.
Turkish officials have said the process of an organized return not to the border area but across Syria has already been launched in discussions with Damascus. Russia and Iran have also been party to the Syrian crisis by militarily backing Assad but have been working to help ease the thaw between Ankara and the Assad regime in recent years although normalization talks have stalled since last year.
Some 554,000 Syrians have so far returned from Türkiye to the region, which has been improved with new schools, hospitals, organized industrial sites and better infrastructure. More than 6 million Syrians now live in nearly 107,000 cinder-block homes erected in Afrin.
The housing project is part of the “Aleppo model,” which Türkiye launched last August to repatriate Syrians to their homeland and return illegal migrants by bolstering economic, social, cultural, industrial and agricultural infrastructure in northern Syria.
For Syrian refugees under temporary protection status in Türkiye, the country has an employment program that registers them as insured guest workers.
