Mohammad sat outside a cafe in Istanbul, Turkish pop music blaring from a speaker above his head. Leaving his glass of tea to go cold, he began to talk about his home in Syria. 

“I can’t go there, it’s impossible,” he said. “You can punish me and send me to another country but you can’t send me back home. I can’t live there. Maybe I’ll lose my life.” 

Mohammad, now 24 years old, asked to be identified by only his first name, owing to safety concerns. He left the countryside of Aleppo, in the west of the country, in 2016. Since then, he has lived in Turkey as a refugee. While he is terrified by the prospect of going back to his village, the Syrian regime, guided by its ally Russia, has declared that it is now time for the 6.6 million people displaced by 10 years of civil war to return to the country.

On November 11, the Russian-organized International Conference on the Return of Syrian Refugees was held in Damascus. It was clear from the invitations sent to allied nations that the main goals of the gathering were to seek money for reconstruction and to show the world that Syria is now stable enough for international sanctions against it to be lifted.