10 OFWs from Syria return home Tuesday night

DFA spokesman Raul Hernandez. CATHY MIRANDA/INQUIRER.net

MANILA, Philippines -Ten overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) from Syria, including four children aged eight to 15, will arrive in Manila Tuesday night.

In a statement, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) said the OFWs would arrive at 10:10 p.m. on board Emirates flight EK 334.

On Monday, 27 OFWs arrived by the same flight.

The second batch of repatriates will bring to 1,771 the total number of Filipinos evacuated by a DFA-led team from the strife-torn Middle East country.

The DFA had also announced that at least 1,300 Filipino workers in Syria have expressed willingness to return home.

In earlier reports, DFA said that the escalating violence in Syria, and the high number of undocumented Filipinos there, made it more difficult to conduct repatriations.

“It has always been challenging to repatriate but of course when there is more violence and unrest then it becomes difficult to repatriate people, to seek them to go places where we could talk to their employers and do some arrangements with the government,” Raul Hernandez, DFA spokesperson, said in earlier briefings with reporters.

“The challenge is really trying to find our people in Syria because they are undocumented and secondly negotiating with their employers because many of them have not finished their contracts and therefore we have to pay for the deployment cost,” he added.

The Philippine government ordered a mandatory evacuation of Filipinos from Syria and banned them from working in the country since it was declared under crisis alert level 4 in December 2011.