BEIRUT: Progressive Socialist Party leader Walid Jumblatt and Turkey’s Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu agreed during talks that a political solution is the only way to resolve the increasingly violent crisis in Syria.

“[Both officials] jointly highlighted the importance of taking political and humanitarian measures to save Syria and stressed that the political solution is the only alternative to the mounting violence of the Syrian regime, which results only in further violence,” the PSP said in a statement issued Friday, following Jumblatt’s return to Beirut.

The statement said that Jumblatt’s visit was in line with an agreement he made with Davutoglu during the Turkish minister’s visit to Beirut last month to continue discussing the situation in Lebanon and the Arab region.

The PSP leader has repeatedly called on Syrian President Bashar Assad, who is grappling with a popular uprising now in its 11th month, to withdraw troops from cities, release political prisoners, engage in dialogue with the Syrian opposition and hold accountable those responsible for the killing of civilians.

The U.N. estimates that more than 6,000 people, mainly civilians, have been killed in Assad’s crackdown.

Minister for the Displaced Alaiddine Terro, who is also an MP in Jumblatt’s bloc, said that the motivations behind the Druze leader’s trips abroad are clear.

“His permanent concern is to prevent the repercussions of Arab and international crises from affecting the Lebanese national fabric,” Terro told the Central News Agency.

In late January, Jumblatt flew to Moscow where he held talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and other Russian officials.

Terro said that Jumblatt’s calls for dialogue among Lebanese leaders and between Sunnis and Shiites are “sincere,” especially given the numerous Sunni-Shiite conflicts taking place in several Arab and Asian countries.

Separately, Zghorta MP and Marada Movement leader Suleiman Franjieh, a long-time Syria ally, warned that once the Syrian regime restores calm in Syria, the security situation could deteriorate in Lebanon as opposition fighters flee over the border.

“We remember that when events were over in Hama in the 1980s, many [Islamists] fled [from there] to Lebanon and battles broke out to defeat them,” Franjieh said, in reference to clashes between the Syrian army and Islamists in the city of Tripoli. The conflict erupted shortly after the Syrian regime, under Bashar’s father, Hafez, crushed an uprising in the city of Hama in 1982.

“I warn today against a repetition of the same scenario, in order to prevent a dangerous situation in the north,” Franjieh said during a dinner in the northern mountain town of Ehden.

Franjieh expressed his optimism that an exit from the Syrian crisis was inevitable. “Our choices will prove correct in the end and the situation in Lebanon and Syria will be at its best,” he said. “We only have to overcome this difficult and delicate phase.”

He described plots to drive a wedge between Iran and Syria by sowing Sunni-Alawite strife as “mere wishes.”

Meanwhile, Metn MP Ibrahim Kanaan, from Michel Aoun’s Change and Reform Parliamentary bloc, implicitly slammed a speech made by Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea on Syria’s uprising during a March 14 rally to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

In his speech Tuesday, Geagea saluted the opposition and slammed Assad’s regime. Speaking to officials from Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement in a gathering at Nahr al-Mawt in Metn, Kanaan said that Geagea’s stance was not in line with March 14 leaders’ call for a state to state relationship between Lebanon and Syria.