Syria's Foreign Minister said Tuesday that the Syrian government is paying great attention to the return of the Syrian refugees and is exerting great efforts to provide them with a dignified life, according to state news agency SANA.
Walid al-Muallem made the remarks during his meeting with the visiting Executive Director of the World Food Program (WFP), David Beasley, in which both sides discussed means to improve the humanitarian situation of the Syrians who have been affected by the Syrian war, according to SANA.
His remarks come just days after President Bashar al-Assad stated that the return of the Syrian refugees to their homes is a priority to the Syrian government.
In recent months, several batches of thousands of refugees have returned from Lebanon to their homes in the northern countryside of the capital Damascus.
Mireille Girard, the representative for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Lebanon, said Sunday that 88 percent of the Syrian refugees in Lebanon want to return to their homeland.
Over one million Syrian refugees are registered with the UNHCR in Lebanon, while Lebanon's government estimated the actual number of Syrians in the country to be 1.5 million.
Russia has drafted a strategy and presented it to the Lebanese authorities, which aims at securing the return of 890,000 refugees to Syria from Lebanon.
Syria's border with Jordan is opened recently after three years of closure. Jordan hosts 1.4 million Syrian refugees.
Out of an estimated pre-war 22-million population in Syria in 2016, 13.5 million were identified by the United Nations as in need of humanitarian assistance, with more than 6 million forced into internal displacement, and about 5 million fleeing abroad.
