LONDON: Asaad Hassan Al-Shaibani, the foreign minister of the Syrian Arab Republic, and Tarek Mitri, the Lebanese deputy prime minister, discussed the return of displaced Syrians from Lebanon during a meeting at Tishreen Palace in Damascus on Monday. Key topics during their talks, which focused on practical steps to address shared challenges, included the administrative, social and educational issues affecting Syrians living in Lebanon, and the wider situation they face, the Syrian Arab News Agency reported. Syria’s minister of higher education and scientific research, Marwan Al-Halabi, minister of education, Mohammed Abdulrahman Turko, and minister of social affairs and labor, Hind Kabawat, also attended the meeting. Currently, 854,633 Syrian refugees in Lebanon remain registered with the UN Human Rights Council. However, the Lebanese government estimates the true number of people who fled the civil war in Syria, which began in 2011 and ended with the collapse of the Assad regime in December 2024, and have yet to return to be about 1.12 million. About 1.3 million people returned to Syria from other countries in 2025, according to the UN Refugee Agency, marking one of the largest refugee-return movements in the world last year.