Austria’s caretaker government has stopped all asylum claims from Syrians and says it is making plans to repatriate or deport people back to their homeland, arguing that the situation in the country has changed fundamentally.

Germany (home to a million Syrians), the United Kingdom, France, and Greece have all said they will halt asylum decisions for now.

The moves potentially leave thousands of Syrians in limbo, following the collapse of the Assad regime after 50 years of brutal rule.

Since 2011, the UN says more than 14 million Syrians have been forced to flee their homes in search of safety.

Austria’s Chancellor Karl Nehammer, a conservative who is a hardliner on immigration, said in a post on X that the government would “support all Syrians who have found refuge in Austria and want to return to their home country”.

He added that the “security situation in Syria must also be reassessed in order to make deportations possible again in the future”.

In a statement, Austria’s Interior Ministry said “the political situation in Syria has changed fundamentally and, above all, rapidly in recent days”.

Around 95,000 Syrians live in Austria, many of whom arrived during the migrant crisis of 2015 and 2016. A backlash against them has fuelled support for the far right and conservatives in Austria.

Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees has put on hold all pending applications from Syrian asylum seekers.

Officials say the political situation is so uncertain in Syria, that it is not possible to reach a proper decision about whether the country is safe or not.

At the moment 47,270 Syrians in Germany are waiting for an answer to their asylum applications. Those who have already been granted asylum are not affected.Germany has the largest Syrian diaspora population outside of the Middle East, with about one million Syrians living in Germany. About 700,000 are classed as refugees.

British Home Secretary Yvette Cooper confirmed that the UK has “paused asylum decisions on cases from Syria while the Home Office reviews and monitors the current situation”.

Cooper said the situation in the country is “moving extremely fast after the fall of the Assad regime” and added that some people are already returning to Syria.

Between 2011 and 2021 more than 30,000 Syrians were granted asylum in the UK.

Most of these were resettled under humanitarian schemes and came directly from other countries they had fled to, such as Turkey and Lebanon.

In 2019, it was calculated that around 47,000 Syrians were living in the UK, but that number is thought to have since fallen to around 30,000.

France is working on a policy similar to the one put forward by Germany, with a decision expected in the next few hours, according to the Reuters news agency.

Meanwhile, thousands of Syrians exiled in Lebanon and Jordan have been returning home. But on the Lebanese border, the flow has been in both directions.

An increasing number of Syrians were trying to get into Lebanon, prompting Lebanese military reinforcements. He says some feared an increase in chaos or crime at home, though they also say they have received reassurances this will not happen.

Lebanon hosts more than one million Syrian refugees but has been tightening up the rules for them to enter the country.

An official from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees told Der Spiegel news magazine on Monday that the move was taken in light of the unclear and unpredictable political situation in Syria, which would place asylum decisions “on shaky ground”.

No further decisions will be made on undecided asylum cases until further notice, which affects 47,770 applications by Syrian nationals.

About 1.3 million people with Syrian roots live in Germany, the vast majority of whom arrived in 2015 and 2016 when then-Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed refugees fleeing Syria’s devastating war.

However, in more recent years, Germany’s political climate has turned sharply against immigration.

After a deadly knife attack in Solingen in August, committed by a Syrian national whose asylum case had been rejected, top government figures, including Chancellor Olaf Scholz, called for a deportation ban to Syria to be lifted in the case of criminals.

On Monday, senior members of the opposition Christian Democratic Union (CDU), argued for Germany to begin returning Syrians to their homeland en masse.

The party is leading in polls before federal elections in February with campaign promises that include cracking down on irregular migration and increasing deportations.

“I believe that there will be a reassessment of the situation in Syria and, therefore, also a reassessment of the question of who is allowed to seek protection in our country and who is not,” Jurgen Hardt, a CDU member of parliament, told the broadcaster ZDF.

His party colleague Jens Spahn suggested Germany charter planes and offer 1,000 euros ($1,058) to each Syrian who returns home.

Austria’s caretaker government on Monday also announced asylum proceedings for Syrians would be paused.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Greece, which is also home to tens of thousands of Syrians who fled the war, said in a statement:

“A return to democratic normalcy must put an end to migrant flows from the long-suffering country and open the way to the safe return of Syrian refugees to their homes.”

Tareq Alaows, spokesman for the refugee advocacy group Pro Asyl said that the decision to stop processing asylum applications will leave people in limbo for months, jeopardise their integration into German society, and fuel a sense of fear and uncertainty.

He stressed that the political situation is neither safe nor stable in Syria and action from the international community will be needed to create a path to democracy.

Spahn is engaging in a “cheap election campaign attempt to win votes on the right-wing fringe of society”, he said.

Andrea Lindholz, a CDU speaker on home affairs, told the Rheinische Post newspaper that a lasting peace in Syria would mean many Syrians would lose their “need for protection and thus the basis of their right of residence in Germany”.

Some figures within the Greens and Social Democratic Party (SPD), both of which have been in government since 2021, pushed back against making dramatic changes to the country’s asylum policy or making refugees the focus of the election campaign.

“I warn against a populist debate with the tenor: ‘Now everyone has to go back immediately,’” the SPD’s Michael Roth told Der Spiegel.

A spokesperson for Germany’s Ministry of the Interior told the Funke media group on Monday that it was not yet clear whether there would be movements of refugees into or out of Syria.

The ministry will not yet assess whether the country is safe for refugees to return to or is a safe destination for deportations, the spokesperson said.

Currently, Germany’s Federal Foreign Office does not consider Syria a safe country of return due to the war and a high risk of torture.On Sunday, Scholz and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock welcomed the end of al-Assad’s rule.

“The people of Syria deserve a better future. They have been through horrible things. A whole generation has grown up in war, hardship and humanitarian deprivation, threatened by constant displacement,” Baerbock wrote on X.

Over the weekend, thousands of Syrians took to the streets of cities like Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Essen to celebrate the overthrow of al-Assad. In the Berlin districts of Neukolln and Kreuzberg, cars draped with the flag of the Syrian opposition circled neighbourhoods, honking their horns, while large crowds gathered to chant and sing late into the night.Mohammad al Masri, one of the participants, had already tried to find flights from Berlin to Damascus. “My feelings are totally mixed up. I don’t even know if this is a dream or if it’s true,” said the 32-year-old, who has been living in Germany for almost a decade.

Al Masri is from Daraa, known as the cradle of the Syrian revolution, and took part in some of the earliest protests against al-Assad’s rule in 2011.

“Many people died just because they came out and called for freedom. Now, I can see it. … We are finally realising our dream,” he said. “I can return home, finally meet my parents, meet my friends, sleep in my room again, experience the air, the atmosphere of my homeland.”

After a decade in Turkiye, Roaa, 30, who is originally from the coastal city of Latakia, moved to Berlin, where she works as a software engineer.

“Up until now, we were always worried about our future because we had no country that we can go back to. But now, we have hope, which is just amazing.”

Her family is already planning to return.“We have hope because we, the Syrian people, love each other and love our country, but it’s going to be a lot of work to get Syria to a place where we can live with dignity, but that’s a very big first step already.”