Refugees are returning to Syria but millions more could be on the move

It is only human to rejoice at the scenes of unbridled celebration on the streets of Damascus and Aleppo over the past few days. The sudden collapse of Bashar al-Assad's blood-soaked dictatorship has to be welcomed.

What is more, it has already prompted sizeable numbers of Syrian refugees to start returning to their homeland. Huge crowds have gathered at border crossings in southern Turkey.

The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, announced plans to reopen a third border crossing to ease the pressure, predicting increased returns as stability improves under new leadership in Syria.

'As Syria gains more stability, God willing,' he said, 'voluntary, safe, and honourable returns will increase.'

However only a naive idealist can possibly imagine that the problems of Syria have all been swept away following al-Assad's flight to Moscow.

The events of recent history, from the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003 to the so-called Arab Spring rebellions of 2011 and downfall of Libya's despotic leader Muammar Gaddafi later that year, have shown us that revolution and regime change in the Middle East rarely result in peace and goodwill.

Iraq, post-Hussein, collapsed into civil war then fell victim to the jihadists of ISIS who took over swathes of the country for years before being beaten back by government forces. Libya became a failed state, the playground of terrorists and people-smugglers as well as – in the absence of any functioning navy to police its maritime borders – the main route of illegal migration to Europe.

Meanwhile, Syria descended into a civil war following Bashar al-Assad's clampdown on the 2011 Arab Spring rebellions against his regime, prompting millions of refugees to leave the country for the West, including Germany, where they were famously welcomed by the then Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Tragically, there is every possibility that Syria – a highly complex tinderbox of a nation full of different religious and secular groupings – could now implode and become a bloodbath again, precipitating a new wave of migrants to a Europe still struggling to cope with that first influx of Syrian refugees.

Much depends on the jihadist Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, leader of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) rebel group which overthrew Assad and which, tellingly, the Starmer government said this week it would not yet remove from a list of banned terrorist organisations.

This is a man with blood on his hands; an autocrat who does not believe in democracy, even if he now claims he wants to unite his shattered nation and says he has moderated his approach since cutting ties with Al-Qaeda in 2016.

His rebel group HTS remains full of hard-line religious fundamentalists with a score to settle. It is also just 30,000 members strong in a country of 23 million.

As the military analyst professor Michael Clarke said: 'The chances of them being able to bring everyone together under the banner of Syrian patriotism is not great – so I suspect they won't hold together for long.'

So we could soon be facing a new civil war in Syria. That would reverse the trickle of refugees heading back to the country with hope in their hearts, and mean millions of migrants once again heading the other way from Syria.

It would result, too, in a hugely increased terror threat for the West as the thousands of jihadists currently locked up in Syria leave its shores for the West.

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As the Mail reported yesterday, former MI6 chief Sir Alex Younger has warned that the toppling of the Assad regime posed a 'chronic' threat to the West's security and risked a 'serious spike' in the terrorist threat level.

In November 2015, Islamic State terrorists murdered at least 130 people in a series of attacks in Paris after entering the country in the refugee wave. Other Islamist terror attacks in Germany involved people who'd arrived as asylum seekers.

On New Year's Eve that year, 1,200 women were sexually assaulted during the celebrations in Cologne. The perpetrators were largely asylum seekers and many of those arrested had arrived that year, although the German media and authorities were accused of covering up the inconvenient facts.

This threat of a new influx of migrants is why Britain, Sweden, France and a number of other European countries this week acted commendably quickly in announcing a pause in processing asylum claims from Syria. Austria is even investigating the repatriation of tens of thousands of Syrian refugees on the basis the Assad regime they were fleeing no longer exists.

To cope with this looming crisis, Britain and Europe will have to be a good deal more ruthless and decisive than they were in response to the unfolding refugee crisis a decade or so ago.

Then, neither the metropolitan social liberals surrounding Prime Minister David Cameron nor a Labour Party dominated by idealistic middle-class human rights lawyers had any understanding of the huge public opposition to unbridled immigration, which was soon to become the most powerful reason why the British public voted for Brexit.

It is this strength of public opinion that explains why Nigel Farage's Reform Party has sped from being a fringe group to enjoying its surge in the national opinion polls, after Britain allowed in more than 1.6 million people in net migration in the last two years. And why both Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch have been focusing on the subject in the past weeks.

In Germany, where nearly one million Syrians now live, the ballooning welfare bill for asylum seekers has helped the German hard right party AfD surge in the polls.

Immigration is also the issue that has driven a rebirth of the Right in France, Italy and many countries on the east of Europe that are more vulnerable to overland migration of Middle Eastern refugees and economic migrants from sub-Saharan Africa.

There is no question in my mind that Europe's leaders have to act proactively. They have to work with allies internationally and in the Middle East to stabilise Syria.

They should consider reintroducing the move that brought an end to the first wave of Middle Eastern refugees in 2016 – a €6 billion payment from the EU to President Erdogan's Turkey in exchange for stopping the flow of migrants to Europe.

They must toughen their immigration and asylum regimes, which could mean putting up 'no entry' signs across Europe and suspending Schengen policies, as countries like Germany have already done temporarily, so that only real, provable asylum cases are allowed in.

The question is whether a Labour Government – in thrall to human rights activists and international obligations that other countries seem to skirt – is prepared to be more ruthless than its Conservative predecessors over the past decade, which presided over the biggest migration policy failure in British history.

If it isn't, it will soon learn that the lesson of the last decade in Europe is that immigration is a powerful political force that political parties ignore at their peril.

Alan Mendoza is executive director of the Henry Jackson Society.