ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq – The European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA) on Monday announced that asylum applications are down by 23 percent, attributing the decline to fewer Syrian applicants since the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

The agency announced the mid-year review of asylum data. The numbers showed that 399,000 asylum applications were recorded across European countries by the end of June 2025, 23 percent lower in comparison with the first half of 2024.

The report claims that this decline “was driven by far fewer Syrians” applying for asylum, noting that the Syrian “number of applications dropped by two-thirds.”

As a result, Germany is “no longer the main receiving EU+ country,” with France and Spain recording more asylum applications.

This shift is attributed to the fall of the Assad Regime in December 2024. The regime was the main reason behind the spike in Syrian applications for a decade, as Syrians “were consistently the main citizenship seeking protection,” in European countries, according to the report.

Apart from Europe, many more countries around the globe housed Syrian refugees during the reign of Assad in the wake of the Syrian civil war.

Turkey hosted the highest number of Syrian refugees with around 3.2 million people. Turkish Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya in late August said that over 450,000 Syrian nationals had returned home following the collapse of the regime, bringing the total of Syrian returnees from Turkey to over 1.1 million.

Before the fall of the regime, Syrians made up one of the world’s largest refugee populations. A UN report published in March estimated that since 2011, “more than 14 million Syrians have been forced to flee their homes in search of safety.”

The refugee crisis in Syria began in 2011 due to the government’s violent crackdown on opposition protestors, which resulted in a civil war that lasted more than a decade until the toppling of the regime in December 2024, when armed groups took over the capital Damascus.

Reporting by Hevi Karam