When Kotaiba Aal, a Syrian, arrived in a picturesque Swedish college town in 2008 as a graduate student, he immediately felt out of place. Despite an unusually high proportion of sunny days for Sweden, he was not at home in Karlstad.
“I was treated really well with a lot of respect and kindness, but I always felt like a guest,” Mr. Aal says. “I looked like the black sheep.”
After finishing his master’s degree, he promptly planned to return home to Damascus.
Why We Wrote This
Sweden took in nearly 200,000 Syrians during the Arab Spring and Syrian civil war, but now that the Assad regime is gone, the government wants them to go home. For those who’ve built a new life in Sweden, that’s not a small request.
Except, he couldn’t.
First, Syria broke into protests in 2010 – which President Bashar al-Assad’s regime cracked down on. Mr. Aal’s family advised him to stay put. By 2011, the protests had spiraled into a full-fledged war with indiscriminate attacks on civilians. More than 7 million Syrians were forced to flee the country. Sweden, notably, became the first European country to offer Syrians permanent residency upon arrival.
In the meantime, Mr. Aal built a new life in Sweden. He pursued his doctorate, married a Swedish woman, and founded a startup company that develops a chickpea-based protein alternative. Last year, he was awarded the country’s most prestigious recognition for entrepreneurs with immigrant backgrounds.
When the Assad regime fell in December 2024, a window opened for Syrians to return to their native 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 the refugees not only could go back, but should.
Yet the Syrian expats are finding that it’s not that easy.
“When Syrians came here in the beginning, 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. Children went to school, so it became pretty difficult for them to return, because their children speak Swedish, not even Arabic.”
“Returning to Syria is not going back to where they had been 10 or 15 years ago; they have changed, the country has changed, and the people who remain have changed,” says Wendy Pearlman, a scholar of Middle Eastern politics at Northwestern University who has written two books featuring firsthand Syrian testimonials about the uprising, war, and refugee crisis. “That’s incredibly challenging, demanding, and exhausting.”
Changing attitudes
Since the war, more than half the country’s native-born population has been forced into exile, resulting in a far-flung diaspora scattered from Brazil to Sweden. For more than a decade, Syrians were the world’s largest refugee population.
But Sweden, which 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 at almost 200,000 people as of 2025 according to official records, are navigating the rise of right-wing sentiments as the Swedish Democrats, a nationalist party, amasses political power.
In recent years, right-wing Swedish politicians have often warned about the dangers posed by a “parallel society,” created by immigrants who failed to integrate into Swedish society. A day after the regime fell, Sweden’s Migration Agency put all asylum requests from Syria on hold.
While the Assad regime is gone, the Syrian diaspora overwhelmingly considers that a permanent return is too risky. In the past decade, about 130,000 Syrians in Sweden have acquired Swedish citizenship, allowing them to safely visit Syria while weighing the risks. During a recent visit to Damascus, the reality on the ground began to settle in for Jihad Rahmoon, a Syrian living in Malmö since 2014.
Mr. Rahmoon says he found a country still reeling from more than a decade of war: severely destroyed infrastructure, an economy recovering 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 build on the networks forged during the war. More than $3 to $4 billion in remittance flows provided a vital lifeline to the Syrian economy. Syrian doctors contributed medical relief to opposition-held areas while activists lobbied governments across Europe and the United States to adopt policies more supportive of the movement against the regime. Along Syria’s borders, cities such as Gaziantep in Turkey became a hub for nongovernmental 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 Syria-Nordic Partnership and Alliance 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 investment into Syria’s economy.
Closing doors in Sweden
Meanwhile, in Sweden, public opinion toward immigration has shifted dramatically.
Sweden celebrated that for the first time in 40 years, more people were leaving rather than arriving as migrants in the country, according to data from its Ministry of Justice. In 2025, the number of individuals granted asylum in Sweden dropped 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 given permanent residency on arrival, the reality for someone migrating today is starkly different. Even after migrants arrive in the country, new labor migration policies make it difficult to stay.
When Ahmed Naji arrived in Malmö in 2021 during a stark Swedish winter, he was affected by the country’s more recent tightening policies.
“As a newcomer, it took so long to get a residence, and it was so hard at the beginning,” Mr. Naji said. “You don’t feel like anyone is supporting you, and, in a way, I came late to the country. When I came, they didn’t want any more immigrants.”
He fled Syria to avoid being conscripted into the Assad regime’s military, even as his father’s name was found on a list at Sednaya prison. He says he “would never go back,” despite the turn of events.
Mr. Naji wanted to start his own business as a photographer – his passion – but he was instead pushed toward a path as an electrician or plumber by Swedish social workers. While his high school diploma from Syria was transferred to Sweden, he had to restart his higher education.
Now he weaves through Malmö’s streets with a wide grin on a scooter he bought with his savings from working at Lidl, a grocery store chain. He recently renewed his residency permit for two more years.
He aspires to complete his graduate studies in Sweden, but recent immigration policy changes mandate that he hold a stable, full-time job while on a temporary residency permit. He feels that his aspiration to attend graduate school and build a permanent life in Sweden is unattainable at times.
“We survived … there, but then we’re trying to survive here,” Mr. Naji says.
“We can build a bridge”
At the start of 2026, Sweden increased the amount it would give migrants to voluntarily return to their home country to 350,000 Swedish krona ($39,000). 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 ashamed,” Mr. Rahmoon says of when he heard about the policy. “It’s not the money that we came after. We came after dignity, safety, and doing something for our future.”
In fact, he sees Sweden as a permanent home, even more so after the Assad regime fell, because of his children.
“We can build a bridge between Sweden and Syria,” Mr. Rahmoon says. “Many Syrians have children, and those children are having maybe the best opportunities in the world for education, for building a future. Syrians don’t want to sacrifice that, to go back to Syria now directly, to lose everything.”
