"The government will continue to evacuate 96 Indonesian citizens who are willing to return home," director of protection of Indonesian citizens and legal entities at the ministry, Judha Nugraha, said here on Thursday.
According to him, the 96 Indonesians are a group of students whose evacuation will be assisted by the Indonesian Embassy in Damascus.
However, he did not provide further details about the evacuation timeline.
"Students will likely be evacuated in the second wave, after the current repatriation of Indonesian citizens who are migrant workers," he informed.
He said that the current evacuation process is being carried out for 37 Indonesian citizens, with their repatriation taking place in three stages.
The first stage involved the evacuation of 22 Indonesians via air from Damascus on Qatar Airways flight QR6381 flying the Doha-Jakarta route, which was scheduled to arrive at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Tangerang, Banten, at 2:45 p.m. local time on Thursday.
The second stage involved the evacuation of 12 persons via Qatar Airways flight QR956 flying the Doha-Jakarta route, which was scheduled to land at the same airport at 3:10 p.m. local time on Thursday.
"The first two flights this afternoon have arrived with 32 Indonesian citizens and two spouses via," Nugraha informed.
The last stage involved the evacuation of three Indonesian citizens, who were scheduled to arrive at Soekarno-Hatta Airport around 9:25 p.m. local time on Thursday.
Based on data from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he said, the majority of the 37 evacuees are non-procedural migrant workers who were employed in the domestic sector.
Those who were successfully repatriated, he continued, were women from various regions, such as Lampung, Banten, West Java, and West Nusa Tenggara.
Earlier, the Indonesian Embassy in Damascus unveiled the plan to evacuate Indonesian nationals following the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime.
The embassy said that all Indonesian citizens in Syria, totaling 1,162, were safe amid the change of power in the conflict-torn country.
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Translator: Azmi Syamsul Ma'arif, Yashinta Difa
Editor: Azis Kurmala
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