Austria's interior minister, Gerhard Karner, proudly announced the news in front of cameras on Thursday, July 3, at Vienna Airport. "For the first time in nearly fifteen years, a Syrian offender was today deported directly to Syria, specifically to Damascus," declared the official from the Österreichische Volkspartei (ÖVP, conservative party), just hours after a plane took off with the first known case of a Syrian refugee being directly deported to their country by an EU state since the start of the civil war in 2011.

This 32-year-old man, who arrived in Austria in 2013, lost his refugee status after being sentenced to seven years in prison in 2018. However, like all Syrians present in Europe, he had until recently been protected from deportation due to the risk of ill-treatment he faced in Syria as long as Bashar al-Assad remained in power. Since the dictator's fall in December 2024, several European political leaders have traveled to Damascus in an effort to resume deportations in coordination with the new Syrian authorities.

Two countries have been especially active in pushing for this policy: Austria and Germany, which have both welcomed hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees since the 2015 migration crisis but now face a resurgent far right in their national politics. At the end of April, Karner visited Damascus with his then German counterpart, Social Democrat Nancy Faeser, to ask the new Syrian interior minister to begin accepting returnees after several assaults allegedly committed by refugees in both countries.

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