RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) — President Donald Ahmad al-Sharaa, the onetime insurgent who last year led the overthrow of the Mideast nation’s longtime autocrat Bashar Assad on Wednesday, a day after announcing his plan to ease sanctions on the country and normalize relations with its new government.
Trump said he was looking to give Syria, which is emerging from more than a decade of brutal civil war “a chance at peace” under al-Sharaa, who had been imprisoned in Iraq for his role in the insurgency following the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of the Arab country.
Al-Sharaa was named president of Syria in January, a month after a stunning offensive by insurgent groups led by al-Sharaa’s , or HTS, that stormed Damascus, ending the 54-year rule of the Assad family.
The United States has been weighing how to handle al-Sharaa since he took power in December.
Many Gulf Arab leaders have rallied behind the new government in Damascus and want Trump to follow, believing it is a bulwark against Iran’s return to influence in Syria, where it had helped prop up Assad’s government during a decadelong civil war.
But longtime U.S. ally Israel has been deeply skeptical of al-Sharaa’s extremist past and cautioned against swift recognition of the new government.
The White House signaled that the Trump and al-Sharaa engagement, on the sidelines of a Gulf Cooperation Council meeting in Riyadh convened as part of Trump’s four-day visit to the region, would be brief, with the administration saying the U.S. president had “agreed to say hello” to the Syrian president on Wednesday.
Al-Sharaa will be the first Syrian leader to meet an American president since Hafez Assad met Bill Clinton in Geneva in 2000.
“There is a new government that will hopefully succeed,” Trump said Tuesday, adding, “I say, good luck, Syria. Show us something special.”
Syrians cheered the announcement by Trump that the U.S. will move to lift sanctions on the beleaguered Middle Eastern nation.
The state-run SANA news agency published video and photographs of Syrians cheering in Umayyad Square, the largest in the country’s capital, Damascus. Others honked their car horns or waved the new Syrian flag in celebration.
People whistled and cheered the news as fireworks lit the night sky.
A statement from Syria’s Foreign Ministry issued Tuesday night 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 statement also was careful to describe the sanctions as coming “in response to the war crimes committed by the Assad regime against the Syrian people,” rather than the war-torn nation’s new interim government.
“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.
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Madhani reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
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