European ministers visit Syria to strengthen ties with new government

Syria’s new leaders met the French and German foreign ministers in the capital, Damascus, on Friday in one of the highest-level Western diplomatic visits since the fall of President Bashar Assad last month.

Annalena Baerbock of Germany and her French counterpart, Jean-Noël Barrot, arrived in Damascus for the first such trip in years on behalf of the European Union, as world powers have begun building ties with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist group that leads the new Syrian government.

Baerbock and Barrot met with Ahmad al-Sharaa, the group’s leader, after visiting the notorious Sednaya prison, where Assad’s regime had tortured and killed thousands of detainees.

“We are traveling to Damascus today to offer our support, but also with clear expectations of the new rulers,” Baerbock said in a statement before the meeting. “A new beginning can only happen if all Syrians, no matter their ethnicity and religion, are given a place in the political process.”

The visits are among a flurry of contacts between rebel leaders and Western officials looking to gradually open channels to the new Syrian authorities. Al-Sharaa has worked to project a moderate image since taking power.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is still blacklisted as a terrorist group by the United States and the United Nations because of its past ties to al-Qaida. Al-Sharaa has called on the international community to remove that designation and sought to reassure minority groups, saying he wants to focus on rebuilding Syria after years of civil war.

“The current events demand the lifting of all sanctions on Syria,” he said in a televised interview last month.

Barrot said that France was urging the new rulers in Syria to pursue a political transition that would allow “all the communities in Syria, in all their diversity, to be represented.” Part of that included reaching a “political solution” with the Kurdish minority, he said, which has carved out an autonomous region in northeastern Syria.

The diplomacy comes during a realignment across the Middle East, where Assad’s regime was a core part of Iran’s regional coalition. His family’s decades of iron-fisted rule were opposed by many Syrians, spurring the 2011 uprising and civil war. At least six foreign militaries were involved in the fighting, including those from Iran, Russia and Turkey.

Many countries — including the United States — have begun forging ties with the new government. In late December, Barbara Leaf, the senior State Department official for the Middle East, met with al-Sharaa in Damascus and told him that Washington would no longer pursue an outstanding bounty for his arrest.

Some Syrians — particularly Christians and other minority groups — are uncertain about al-Sharaa, pointing to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s conservative Islamist roots. In Idlib, a province controlled by the group since 2017, its leaders banned buying and selling alcohol and opened a chain of free religious schools. But al-Sharaa’s faction has eschewed the draconian decrees and brutal punishments of extremists like the Taliban and the Islamic State group.

In a sign of the jitters among some Syrians, a posting on a Facebook page run by the Education Ministry this week described a new curriculum that was interpreted by some as taking a more Islamist slant.

It was not clear whether any of the changes had been implemented, but the minister of education, Nadhir Al-Qadri, said in a statement that the curriculum was unchanged except for the removal of “content glorifying the Assad regime” and the addition of images of the Syrian revolutionary flag.

Officials in Hayat Tahrir al-Sham have laid out an ambitious plan for establishing a new government, and rebel leaders have assumed key positions to oversee a transition. They say they are establishing a caretaker government in consultation with Syrians of all backgrounds, as well as a committee to draft a new Syrian Constitution.

Many in the region are also wary of the new Syrian government, including Gulf States such as the United Arab Emirates, which has long tried to prevent the rise of groups that embrace political Islam, as well as Israel.

Overnight Friday, Israeli warplanes bombed Syrian defense research sites near Aleppo, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitoring group. There were no immediate reports of casualties. Israel declined to comment on the report.

Israel has conducted hundreds of airstrikes against Syrian military sites since the fall of Assad in an effort to eliminate sophisticated arms like chemical weapons and long-range missiles. Al-Sharaa has said he will uphold a long-standing ceasefire agreement with Israel, saying that Syria poses no threat to its neighbors.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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