A little more than a week after overthrowing the longtime Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, the rebel alliance that took power in Syria was making rapid progress toward international legitimacy as its officials began to receive diplomats from the United Nations, the Middle East and Europe.
The leader of the rebel coalition, Ahmed al-Shara, met on Sunday with the United Nations special envoy to Syria, Geir O. Pedersen, and they discussed the unfolding political transition, according to a message on Telegram posted by the coalition. Mr. al-Shara, better known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, “stressed the importance of rapid and effective cooperation” to rebuild Syria, develop its economy and maintain Syria as a unified territory, the Telegram post said.
Speaking to reporters on his arrival in the Syrian capital, Damascus, Mr. Pedersen said many challenges lay ahead for Syria and called for increased aid to assist with the country’s humanitarian crisis.
Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, told reporters on Monday that she had sent the “European top diplomat in Syria” to meet with the new government in Damascus. The European Union is the biggest donor of humanitarian aid to Syria through U.N. agencies, making the relationship with Brussels a crucial one.
France’s foreign ministry said on Sunday that a team of diplomats would travel to Syria on Tuesday. And Turkey and Qatar, which were in contact with the rebels well before the surprise offensive that rocketed them from obscurity in Syria’s northwest to control of nearly the entire country, were both reopening their embassies in Damascus.
Since Mr. al-Assad fled the advancing rebels on Dec. 8, the rest of the world has had to reckon with a sudden new reality in Syria: A country where nearly 14 years of civil war had left Mr. al-Assad in seemingly firm control was now in the hands of a conservative Islamist group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, that the United Nations, the United States, Turkey and many other countries had long designated as a terrorist organization for its early ties to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Arab countries had for years been moving toward normalizing relations with Mr. al-Assad, despite his brutal treatment of his people, and Western countries, while hitting him with heavy sanctions, had grudgingly come to accept that he was there to stay. His overthrow scrambled that calculus, forcing foreign powers to decide how to deal with a largely unknown quantity that many of them had shunned as extremists for years.
Many of those powers, including the United States, European countries and Turkey, say they want to see a stable, unified Syria with an inclusive government that respects the rights of Syria’s minorities, including Shiite Muslims, Druse, Christians of various sects and Alawites, the Shiite offshoot sect that the Assad family and many of its strongest supporters belongs to.
Foreign countries have the leverage to push Syria’s new leadership toward that vision. To unlock greater flows of humanitarian aid, get suffocating economic sanctions lifted and earn international legitimacy — all required for a crippled, impoverished Syria to stabilize and rebuild — Hayat Tahrir al-Sham will need other countries to remove its designation as a terrorist group.
Ms. Kallas has said that the European Union will not lift sanctions on Syria until its new leadership shows it will protect minorities and women’s rights and disavow extremism. On Monday, she told reporters that European foreign ministers meeting in Brussels would discuss “how we engage with the new leadership of Syria and on what level we engage the leadership and, of course, what more steps are we willing to take if we see that Syria goes to the right direction.”
Individual European countries were also gradually reaching out to Damascus.
Italy, which has maintained a diplomatic presence in the Syrian capital since 2018, was the first to engage on the ground. Its ambassador was the only European representative in a meeting the Syrian transitional administration held last week with several Arab ambassadors, according to Italy’s foreign ministry.
Jean-Noël Barrot, France’s foreign minister, told France Inter radio on Sunday that a team of four French diplomats would head to Syria on Tuesday for the first time since 2012, when France and many other countries broke with Mr. al-Assad over the bloody crackdown on peaceful antigovernment protesters that instigated the civil war.
Mr. Barrot said the main goals were to establish first contact with the Syrian authorities there and to evaluate the needs of the Syrian population.
“But also to verify whether or not the initial statements made by this new authority — which were rather encouraging, which called for calm, which apparently did not commit any abuses — are actually being followed up on the ground,” Mr. Barrot added.
The quickening diplomatic engagement reflected the winners and losers in the new Syria.
Russia, a key ally of Mr. al-Assad, said over the weekend that it had evacuated some staff members from its embassy in Damascus, though the embassy confirmed that its ambassador was staying.
But Turkey, which has long had tacit links to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and has emerged as an important go-between for the group and other foreign governments, raised its flag over its embassy in Damascus on Saturday for the first time in 12 years. And Qatar, which like Turkey has maintained a relationship with the group and supports Islamist groups around the Middle East, likewise sent a diplomatic delegation to Syria to reopen its embassy there, its foreign ministry said in a post on X on Sunday evening.
Mr. al-Shara, who has long craved international legitimacy for Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, appears attuned to concerns about whether his group is ready to lead. According to the Telegram post announcing his meeting with Mr. Pedersen, he said it would be important to secure economic and political support for creating a safe environment for the millions of Syrian refugees in the Middle East, Europe and elsewhere to return.
“Leader al-Shara pointed out the need to implement these steps with great care and high precision without haste and under the supervision of specialized teams, so that they are achieved in the best possible way,” it said.
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