San Francisco Frontiers - Rebuilding wrecked Syria vital for regional stability: UN

Reconstruction is one of the most significant challenges facing Syria's new Islamist authorities after the overthrow of longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad last December.

"The international community should definitely rush into rebuilding Syria," Rawhi Afaghani, the UN Development Programme's deputy representative in Syria, told AFP this week during a visit to Geneva.

"Being able to help the country to rebound and come out of this war and come out of this destruction is for the Syrians themselves, but also for the stability and the good of the whole region," he said in the interview.

The Syrian civil war, which erupted in 2011 with Assad's brutal repression of anti-government protests, killed over half a million people and devastated the country's infrastructure.

The World Bank this week estimated that Syria's post-war reconstruction could cost up to $216 billion.

Afaghani said he could not put a price tag on rebuilding Syria, but described the needs as "massive".

Across the country, he said governors had told him about the massive need for housing, schools, and health centres, as well as electricity and water.

Complicating the clean-up efforts are the vast quantities of unexploded ordnance littering the entire country, including within mountains of rubble that need to be cleared, he said.

- 'Tensions' -

More than one million Syrian refugees have already returned from abroad and nearly double as many have returned to their places of origin after being displaced inside the country, UN figures show.

While those returns are a good sign, Afaghani warned that they were "putting a lot of pressure on the infrastructure, on the transportation, on the education, on the bakeries".

"People are returning to destroyed houses or houses that are actually occupied by other people," he said.

Afaghani warned that the strain on infrastructure "could lead to community tensions".

At the same time, he said the lack of infrastructure, services and jobs was dissuading many Syrians who want to return home from doing so.

"We thought there would be a much higher rate of return," he acknowledged, pointing out that most of those who have returned from abroad had left often difficult conditions in neighbouring Jordan and Lebanon.

From Europe, "we don't see that massive return", he said.

Afaghani voiced hope that swift reconstruction could usher in "a stable Syria", which in turn would draw more returns from Europe.

"Those are high-skilled people -- they can rebuild Syria," he said.

Those returnees, he insisted, could also "be a big, good influence in the whole region from an economic perspective, and from a peace-building perspective".

C.Williams--SFF