The hundreds of refugees who returned to their native Syria from Jordan and Lebanon this week are "a very important signal" for stability in the war-wracked country, the Italian Senate's foreign affairs committee chairman said on Tuesday.
"The 700 refugees who returned to Syria over the past 24 hours from Jordan and from Libya are a very important signal for the stabilisation of the country," Vito Petrocelli said in a statement.
“The epoch-making issue of migration, and more generally the search for peace and prosperity in the Mediterranean calls for a new approach, a new vision," Petrocelli went on.
"Italy must cooperate more closely with all the actors who are working with the Syrian government to stabilise and rebuild the country," he said, recalling that before the nearly eight-year-long civil war, Italy was Syria's top trading partner.
"The historic friendship between our two peoples must form a cornerstone in the stabilisation and reconstruction of this sister country," Petrocelli said, hoping that the leaders of Italy, France and Germany might attend future peace talks on Syria.
Some 250,000 Syrians could return to their homeland in 2019 from neighbouring countries, and some 37,000 have returned this year from Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt, according to the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR.
There are as many internally displaced Syrians as refugees and half the country's population of 23 million are homeless. The pace of refugee and displaced return depends on security as well as how they are treated by the authorities, according to the UN.
