Two weeks after seizing energy in a sweeping offensive, Syria’s new chief Ahmed al-Sharaa has stepped up regional contacts, vowing in a gathering Sunday to not “negatively” intervene in neighbouring Lebanon.
Sharaa additionally met with Turkish International Minister Hakan Fidan, video launched by the Anadolu state information company confirmed, after Ankara-backed rebels performed a key position in supporting his Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which seized Damascus on December 8 and ousted longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad.
Turkey’s international ministry launched no particulars of the place the assembly happened within the Syrian capital.
Turkey has maintained robust ties with Syria’s new leaders, and Ankara’s intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalin was in Damascus simply 4 days after Assad fell.
Regional powerhouse Saudi Arabia can also be in direct contact with Syria’s new authorities, having supported the opposition to Assad for years throughout Syria’s civil conflict, and can ship a delegation to the nation quickly, Syria’s ambassador in Riyadh stated.
Throughout his assembly with visiting Lebanese Druze chiefs Walid and Taymur Jumblatt, Sharaa stated Syria will not exert “detrimental interference in Lebanon in any respect”.
He added that Damascus “respects Lebanon’s sovereignty, the unity of its territories, the independence of its choices and its safety stability”.
Syria “will keep at equal distance from all” in Lebanon, Sharaa added, acknowledging that Syria has been a “supply of worry and anxiousness” for the nation.
Walid Jumblatt, lengthy a fierce critic of Assad and his father Hafez who dominated Syria earlier than him, arrived in Damascus Sunday on the head of a delegation of lawmakers from his parliamentary bloc and Druze spiritual figures.
The Druze spiritual minority is unfold throughout Lebanon, Syria and Israel.
He met with Sharaa — also referred to as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani — on the presidential palace, the place the brand new Syrian chief wore a go well with and tie as an alternative of the olive-green army shirt he sported simply days in the past.
Walid Jumblatt accuses the previous Syrian authorities of getting assassinated his father in 1977 throughout Lebanon’s civil conflict.
The Syrian military entered Lebanon in 1976, solely leaving in 2005 after huge strain following the assassination of former prime minister Rafic Hariri, a killing attributed to Damascus and its ally, Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah group.
– ‘Insecurity’ –
Assad was an adherent of the Alawite offshoot of Shiite Islam and projected himself as a protector of the nation’s spiritual and ethnic minorities.
The seizure of energy by the Sunni Islamists of HTS — proscribed as a terrorist organisation by many governments together with america — has sparked concern, although the group has lately sought to average its rhetoric.
Regardless of worries over Syria’s future, world powers together with america and the European Union have stepped up contacts with the war-ravaged nation’s new leaders, urging them to ensure protections for ladies and minorities.
The international leaders have additionally harassed the significance of combating “terrorism and extremism.”
The supreme chief of Iran — a key backer of Assad’s administration earlier than it fell to the rebels — on Sunday predicted “the emergence of a robust, honourable group” that might stand towards “insecurity” in Syria.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stated Syria’s younger males would “stand with energy and willpower towards those that have designed this insecurity and those that have applied it, and God keen, he’ll overcome them”.
Assad had lengthy performed a strategic position in Iran’s “axis of resistance”, a unfastened alliance of regional proxy forces, significantly in facilitating the provision of weapons to Hezbollah in neighbouring Lebanon.
That axis has suffered heavy blows over the previous 12 months with Israel’s decimation of the management of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
Khamenei nonetheless denied that these armed teams acted as proxies, including that: “If someday we wish to take motion, we don’t want a proxy pressure.”
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