Karner: "There must be more deportations to Syria"

Interior Minister Gerhard Karner will receive his Jordanian counterpart Mazin Abdellah Hilal Al Farrayeh on Monday. Jordan is an important player in the region for stability - as an immediate neighbor of Syria, the Interior Ministry announced on Sunday. The focus of the working meeting will include the current situation in Syria and the issue of the return of Syrian nationals.

Already 350 Syrians have voluntarily returned

The Interior Ministry carried out a deportation to Syria for the first time in 15 years on Thursday. It involved a Syrian criminal with ties to the terrorist militia "Islamic State" (IS). The Austrian authorities consider deportation to Syria permissible due to the changed situation after the fall of the Assad regime. The Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad was overthrown on December 8 by a rebel alliance led by the organization Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which was previously close to the terrorist network Al Qaeda. Since then, according to the Interior Ministry, 350 Syrians have voluntarily returned to their homeland. According to Statistics Austria, 104,699 Syrians live in Austria (as of January 1, 2025).

Karner wants further deportations

"There must be further deportations to Syria," Karner said in interviews with "Kurier" and "Presse" (Sunday editions). "We are the first European country to successfully carry out a deportation directly to Syria." Karner spoke of an "enormously important signal. And if we have only prevented one crime with it, then it was important and right." Syria has "great interest in people returning". Over 500,000 Syrians have already returned from the camps around Syria. There is also interest in Afghanistan for people to return and rebuild the country.

Jordan with the highest refugee number per capita

Jordan is among the countries with the highest number of refugees per capita worldwide. After the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, the country took in hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees. According to the United Nations, 680,000 Syrian refugees were registered in Jordan at the end of the previous year. The authorities in Amman, for their part, spoke of a total of around 1.3 million Syrian refugees in Jordan.

The country has also taken in around 2.3 million Palestinian refugees. US President Donald Trump recently proposed relocating Palestinians from the largely destroyed Gaza Strip to Egypt and Jordan, which Amman rejects for domestic political reasons. Due to the loss of humanitarian funds from the USA and other countries, many aid programs for Jordan had to be discontinued.

According to the International Monetary Fund, Jordan's economy is particularly suffering from the war in the Gaza Strip. At the end of January, the European Union pledged loans and investments totaling three billion euros to the country as part of a strategic partnership. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen signed a corresponding agreement with Jordanian King Abdullah II in Brussels. About half of the money is to be provided as loans to the country, the other half in European investments in Jordan.

(APA/Red)

This article has been automatically translated, read the original article here.