TRIPOLI: Hundreds of Syrian refugees living in Libya poured into a travel agency in Tripoli to take advantage of an offer of free tickets to Damascus, AFP journalists saw.

By midday, more than 700 Syrians, many of them residing in Libya for years after fleeing their country’s civil war, had come to collect tickets and travel passes from the agency commissioned by the new authorities in Damascus.

In all, thousands have taken up the offer since the Syrian Arab Republic’s Foreign Ministry first announced it.

Walid Hamud, a 32-year-old refugee who arrived five years ago, acknowledged that “the situation still is not very stable” back home, but nonetheless wanted to return, while keeping open the possibility of coming back to Libya for work “legally with a residence permit”.

Fellow refugee Rami Hassun fled Idlib province in 2020 because his life was in danger, he said.

“Today, Syria is finding peace and is in a better situation than before. We are returning to our country, thank God,” he said.

Once there, “we will strive to work and rebuild everything, given the scale of the destruction”, said Mahmoud Nasr Al-Din, who has been in Libya for three years.

Din said he anticipated “strong demand for labor” back home, but noted returning would have been difficult without the new travel arrangement, given the Syrian Arab Republic’s lack of a fully functioning embassy in Libya.

In mid-August, a Damascus delegation symbolically reopened the embassy, which had been shut in 2012, but it currently does not offer consular services.

While there is no official census of Syrians in Libya, thousands of families have been living in the country for decades, with thousands more arriving since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, many hoping to cross the Mediterranean to Europe.