I’m sure they will lead a peaceful life when they return home.

CAIRO (AP) — A senior official in Egypt’s presidency said Thursday that Egyptians are free to join the fight in Syria and will not be prosecuted upon return amid increasingly public calls by leading clerics for Sunni Muslims to back the rebels there with firepower.

In a response to an Associated Press question about the government’s stance on citizens going to fight alongside Syrian rebels, Khaled al-Qazzaz said that “the right of travel or freedom of travel is open for all Egyptians,” adding that the state was taking no measures against anyone who goes to fight in Syria. He underlined that Egypt seeks a political solution to Syria’s conflict and warned of the danger of it becoming a “regional war.”

The comments by al-Qazzaz, a foreign affairs adviser to Islamist President Mohammed Morsi, come at a time when clerics have stepped up calls for Sunnis in the Arab world to go to Syria to fight the regime in response to the Lebanese Shiite guerrilla group Hezbollah’s overt intervention backing the Syrian military against rebels.

The calls have hiked fears that Syria’s civil war will slide deeper into sectarian conflict and that foreign jihadis will take an even greater role in the rebellion. The presence of non-Syrian extremists, some with al-Qaida links, among the rebels has made the U.S. and its allies reluctant to send weapons to the rebellion.

Speaking in a meeting with foreign journalists, al-Qazzaz dismissed worries that Egyptians who fight in Syria could return home as hardened jihadis, even as extremists in the northern Sinai Peninsula continue to wage assassinations and attacks against the police and military there.

“We don’t consider them a threat,” al-Qazzaz said. “We have a controllable situation in Sinai … We do not have a situation of returning jihadists.”