President Donald Trump met on Wednesday with the new President of Syria, Ahmed al-Shara, a day after announcing that the US would lift sanctions on the country in a major shift in American policy.
It was the first time in 25 years that the leaders of the two countries had met, and another sign that decades of diplomatic isolation for Syria were ending.
The two leaders spoke for about half an hour in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, ahead of Trump’s summit with top officials from six Arab countries, a White House official said. The encounter represented a stunning turnaround for al-Shara, who once led a branch of al Qaida before he broke ties with the jihadist group and sought to moderate his image.
Since al-Shara’s rebel alliance ousted President Bashar al-Assad in December, his administration has been trying to remove lingering international sanctions on Syria in order to break the economic stranglehold on a country that is central to the stability of West Asia.
Trump met al-Shara at the invitation of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, who also took part in the meeting. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who backed the anti-Assad insurgency, joined over phone.
Trump told the Syrian leader that he “has a tremendous opportunity to do something historic in his country”, according to a summary of the meeting from the White House
media secretary, Karoline Leavitt. Trump also urged the Syrian leader to take steps to normalise relations with Israel and tell “all foreign terrorists to leave Syria”, according to the summary.
Trump asked for the Syrian government to “assume responsibility” for over a dozen detention centres holding some 9,000 suspected members of the Islamic State group, Leavitt added.
The prisons are run by the US-backed and Kurdish-led forces that spearheaded the military campaign against the extremists and controlled the last sliver of land they once held in March 2019.
As part of a deal reached in March between the Syrian government and the Kurdish-led forces, all border crossings with Iraq and Turkey, airports and oil fields in the northeast would be brought under the central government’s control by the end of the year. Trump’s desire for Syria to take over the prisons also signals the potential of a full American military withdrawal from Syria.
Syria’s foreign ministry said Trump and al-Shara discussed the Syrian-US partnership in fighting terror and armed groups, such as the IS, standing in the way of stability.
After Trump’s announcement of the plan to lift sanctions, people across Syria cheered in the streets and set off fireworks on Tuesday night to celebrate, hopeful their nation — locked out of credit cards and global finance — might rejoin the world’s economy when they need investments the most.
The statement from Syria’s foreign ministry called the announcement “a pivotal turning point for the Syrian people as we seek to emerge from a long and painful chapter of war”.
“The removal of these sanctions offers a vital opportunity for Syria to pursue stability, self-sufficiency and meaningful national reconstruction, led by and for the Syrian people,” the statement added.
Even before its ruinous civil war that began in 2011, Syria struggled under a tightly controlled socialist economy and under sanctions by the US as a state-sponsor of terror since 1979.
The Trump-al-Shara meeting took place behind closed doors and reporters were not permitted to witness the engagement. The White House later said it ran for just over 30 minutes, making al-Sharaa the first Syrian leader to meet an American President since Hafez Assad met Bill Clinton in Geneva in 2000.
“I felt very strongly that this would give them a chance,” Trump said of Syria. “It’s not going to be easy anyway, so gives them a good strong chance. And, it was my honour to do so.”
He added: “We made a speech last night and, that was the thing that got the biggest applause from the room.”
Trump cited the intervention of Saudi Prince Mohammed as key to his decision.
After the meeting and the summit, the US President departed Riyadh for Qatar, the second stop on a four-day tour of Gulf states that is the first major overseas trip of his second term. The first day focused in large part on business deals, including for defence equipment and artificial intelligence infrastructure.
New York Times News Service and AP