When Kotaiba Aal, a Syrian, arrived in a picturesque Swedish university town in 2008 as a graduate student, he immediately felt out of place. Despite the unusual proportion of sunny days in Sweden, he was not at home in Karlstad.
“They treated me very well, with a lot of respect and kindness, but I always felt like a guest,” says Mr. Aal. “He looked like the black sheep.”
After finishing his master’s degree, he immediately planned to return home to Damascus.
Why do we write this?
Sweden took in nearly 200,000 Syrians during the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war, but now that the Assad regime is gone, the government wants them to return home. For those who have built a new life in Sweden, this is no small ask.
Except he couldn’t.
First, Syria erupted into protests in 2010, which President Bashar al-Assad’s regime repressed. Mr. Aal’s family advised him to stay where he was. By 2011, protests had turned into a full-blown war with indiscriminate attacks on civilians. More than 7 million Syrians were forced to flee the country. Sweden, in particular, became the first European country to offer Syrians permanent residency upon arrival.
Meanwhile, Mr. Aal built a new life in Sweden. He completed his PhD, married a Swedish woman, and founded a new company developing a chickpea-based protein alternative. Last year, he received the country’s most prestigious recognition for entrepreneurs of immigrant origin.
When the Assad regime fell in December 2024, a window opened for Syrians to return to their home country. And in many host countries in Europe and the Middle East that absorbed large numbers of Syrians during the civil war, governments decided that refugees not only could, but should, return.
However, Syrian expats are realizing that it is not that easy.
“When the Syrians came here at first, many of them thought they would stay here temporarily,” says Mr. Aal. “But because of the regime, many of them have already established a life here. The children were going to school, so it was quite difficult for them to return, because their children speak Swedish, not even Arabic.”
“Going back to Syria is not going back to where they were 10 or 15 years ago; they have changed, the country has changed, and the people who stay have changed,” says Wendy Pearlman, a researcher of Middle East politics at Northwestern University, who has written two books featuring firsthand Syrian accounts of the uprising, war and refugee crisis. “That’s incredibly challenging, demanding and exhausting.”
Changing attitudes
Since the war, more than half of the country’s native population has been forced into exile, resulting in a diaspora spread from Brazil to Sweden. For more than a decade, Syrians were the largest refugee population in the world.
But Sweden, which has long prided itself on its generous asylum stances, has adopted increasingly restrictive and hostile immigration policies. Syrians, the largest foreign-born population in the country, numbering nearly 200,000 by 2025 according to official records, are navigating rising right-wing sentiments as the Sweden Democrats, a nationalist party, amass political power.
In recent years, right-wing Swedish politicians have often warned about the dangers posed by a “parallel society,” created by immigrants who have failed to integrate into Swedish society. One day after the fall of the regime, the Swedish Migration Agency suspended all asylum applications from Syria.
While the Assad regime is gone, the Syrian diaspora overwhelmingly views a permanent return as too risky. In the last decade, around 130,000 Syrians in Sweden acquired Swedish citizenship, allowing them to visit Syria safely while weighing the risks. During a recent visit to Damascus, the reality on the ground began to set in for Jihad Rahmoon, a Syrian who has lived in Malmö since 2014.
Rahmoon says he found a country still reeling from more than a decade of war: infrastructure severely destroyed, an economy reeling from sanctions, revenge violence and a deeply traumatized society. More than 90% of the country’s population lives below the poverty line.
The Syrian diaspora, now close to 7 million, hopes to take advantage of networks forged during the war. More than $3 billion to $4 billion in remittance flows provided a vital lifeline to the Syrian economy. Syrian doctors contributed medical aid to opposition-controlled areas, while activists pressured governments in Europe and the United States to adopt policies that were more supportive of the anti-regime movement. Along Syria’s borders, cities like Gaziantep in Türkiye became a hub for non-governmental organizations and civil society groups.
Mr. Aal felt he had an opportunity to help, as a Syrian living in Sweden. A month after Assad’s fall, he founded the Syrian-Nordic Alliance and Partnership Council, a nonprofit organization based in Malmö, where he lives. His organization, which he describes as “a bridge” between Syria and Sweden, has successfully found funding opportunities and partners. In the future, he hopes to attract Swedish investments into the Syrian economy.
Closing doors in Sweden
Meanwhile, in Sweden, public opinion toward immigration has changed dramatically.
Sweden celebrated that, for the first time in 40 years, more people left the country instead of arriving as immigrants, according to data from its Ministry of Justice. In 2025, the number of people granted asylum in Sweden fell to its lowest level in 40 years. At the same time, the government doubled the income requirement for foreign workers from about $1,300 to $2,600.
While Syrians who arrived in the country in 2014 were granted permanent residency upon arrival, the reality for those migrating today is entirely different. Even after immigrants arrive in the country, new labor migration policies make it difficult for them to stay.
When Ahmed Naji arrived in Malmö in 2021 during a harsh Swedish winter, he was affected by the country’s most recent restrictive policies.
“As a newcomer, it took me a long time to get a residency and it was very difficult at first,” Naji said. “You don’t feel like anyone supports you and, in a way, I arrived late to the country. When I arrived, they didn’t want any more immigrants.”
He fled Syria to avoid being drafted into the Assad regime’s army, even as his father’s name appeared on a list in Sednaya prison. He says he would “never go back,” despite the turn of events.
Naji wanted to start his own business as a photographer (his passion), but Swedish social workers pushed him to become an electrician or plumber. While his high school diploma from Syria was transferred to Sweden, he had to restart his higher studies.
He now rides the streets of Malmö with a broad smile on a scooter he bought with the savings he earned working at Lidl, a supermarket chain. He recently renewed his residence permit for two more years.
He aims to complete his graduate studies in Sweden, but recent changes in immigration policy require him to maintain a stable full-time job while he has a temporary residence permit. He feels that his aspiration to attend graduate school and build a permanent life in Sweden is sometimes unattainable.
“We survived…there, but we’re trying to survive here,” Naji says.
“We can build a bridge”
In early 2026, Sweden increased to 350,000 Swedish crowns ($39,000) the amount it would give migrants to voluntarily return to their country of origin. When Sweden’s Migration Minister Johan Forssell announced the policy change last year, he stated: “We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in our migration policy.”
“I felt embarrassed,” Rahmoon says when he found out about the policy. “It’s not money we were looking for. We came in search of dignity, security and to do something for our future.”
In fact, he sees Sweden as his permanent home, even more so after the fall of the Assad regime, because of his children.
“We can build a bridge between Sweden and Syria,” says Rahmoon. “Many Syrians have children, and those children have perhaps the best opportunities in the world for an education, for building a future. Syrians do not want to sacrifice that, to return now directly to Syria, to lose everything.”
