This article examines how Kurdish Syrian refugees in Lebanon imagine, enable or foreclose return to Syria during the post-Assad transition. Focusing on a community shaped by statelessness, Arabization and uneven recognition of cultural and linguistic rights, it draws on in-depth interviews and small-group discussions with Kurdish Syrians from Jazira, Kobani, Afrin and urban centres. The analysis traces how Turkish military incursions, contested governance, conscription risks, documentation gaps and property dispossession produce a pragmatic return calculus. Rather than a binary choice, return emerges as a conditional horizon dependent on enforceable guarantees of cultural recognition, political participation, protection from forced conscription, and mechanisms for documentation and restitution. Lebanon emerges as a precarious waypoint that sustains Kurdish networks while offering no secure future. Conceptually, the article advances a “conditional returnability threshold,” arguing that durable-solutions frameworks must move beyond regime-centric timelines towards rights-based, community-led conditions for dignified return.