Senior American diplomats traveled through Damascus, the Syrian capital, on Friday to meet with militias controlling the country and with civil society groups, and to look for signs of the journalist Austin Tice and other missing U.S. citizens, the State Department said.
They are the first American diplomats to enter Damascus in more than a decade, according to the State Department, and they aim to help shape the political landscape of Syria after the rapid fall this month of Bashar al-Assad, the longtime autocratic leader.
The United States broke off diplomatic ties with Syria in 2012, the year after Mr. al-Assad ordered his forces to carry out mass atrocities during the country’s civil war.
The visit represents a tentative step toward engagement in Syria, a nation in which U.S. policy in recent years has usually involved the military, not diplomacy. The Biden administration has been in contact with militia leaders but has wrestled with how to directly engage, in part because the United States has designated the lead rebel group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, as a terrorist organization.
In an early concession to the group, the United States will no longer pursue a bounty of up to $10 million for its leader, Ahmed al-Shara, formerly known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani.
That announcement was made in a Friday briefing for reporters by Barbara Leaf, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, one of three Biden officials who visited Damascus and met there with Mr. al-Shara. She was joined by Roger D. Carstens, the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, and Daniel Rubinstein, the new special adviser on Syria.
The meeting and the removal of the bounty were the latest signs of success for Mr. al-Shara’s effort to project a moderate image since taking power — a posture about which some officials and analysts remain skeptical.
The State Department first offered the reward in 2017, when Mr. al-Shara was a rebel fighter who had pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda and led a group that U.S. officials said had “carried out multiple terrorist attacks throughout Syria, often targeting civilians,” along with kidnappings and the massacre of 20 residents in a Syrian Druze village.
Mr. al-Shara has since cut his ties to Al Qaeda and pledges to form an inclusive government that respects the rights of women and minorities. Ms. Leaf told reporters that “he came across as pragmatic” in their meeting, which she described as “quite good, very productive.”
She added that going forward, the United States “will judge by deeds, not just by words,” as it decides how to deal with Mr. al-Shara and his nascent government.
On the question of the bounty, Ms. Leaf said it would be “a little incoherent” for it to remain while American officials met with Mr. al-Shara, and quipped that she might otherwise be expected to call the F.B.I. to report his whereabouts.
But she did not directly answer a question about whether the Biden administration might revoke its designation of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham as a terrorist group, as the group has requested.
Ms. Leaf said the United States could provide legal protections for humanitarian groups who might fear exposure to American sanctions if they work with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham to provide much-needed aid to the country.
The visit was the latest in a flurry of meetings between rebel leaders and Western officials looking to gradually open channels to the new Syrian authorities. Since Mr. al-Assad’s ouster this month, diplomats from Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland and elsewhere have gone to Damascus. Qatar and Turkey are also in the process of reopening their embassies there.
The diplomacy comes during a realignment across the Middle East, where Syria is a major power and stood for decades as an emblem of Arab rule by a single family, one opposed in wartime by most Syrians. At least six foreign militaries were involved in the country’s nearly 14-year civil war, including Iran, Russia and the United States.
The U.S. diplomats also met with and heard from “Syrian civil society activists, members of different communities and other Syrian voices about their vision for the future of their country and how we can help support them,” Ms. Leaf said.
She added that the diplomats had discussed with Mr. al-Shara the “transition principles” that American, Arab and Turkish officials agreed on at a meeting last weekend in Aqaba, Jordan. American officials have emphasized that groups in Syria must build an inclusive process for governance and fairly treat ethnic and religious minorities in the country, including Christians.
The Americans also raised “the critical need to ensure terrorist groups cannot pose a threat inside of Syria or externally, including to the U.S. and our partners in the region,” Ms. Leaf said.
And they made clear their intense interest in the fate of missing American citizens who were abducted in Syria, including Mr. Tice and Majd Kamalmaz, a Syrian American psychotherapist who traveled to Syria to treat traumatized people and was last seen at a government checkpoint in 2017. The State Department declared Mr. Kamalmaz dead earlier this year. The fate of Mr. Tice, who was kidnapped in 2012 while reporting in Damascus, is unclear.
Mr. Carstens provided no new details about either man in Friday’s call. The U.S. hostage envoy said he had been “rather amazed at the amount of secret prisons that Mr. al-Assad seems to have amassed” during his dictatorial rule. He said that in recent years the United States had identified “about six facilities that we believe have a high possibility” of having held Mr. Tice at some point.
Since Mr. al-Assad’s fall, he said, new information has pointed to as many as three more facilities the United States hopes to inspect in addition to the initial six. The total number warranting a search could wind up being as high as 40, Mr. Carstens said. He added that the United States would search “until we find the information that we need to conclude what has happened to Austin, where he is, and to return him home to his family.”
A news conference with the American officials that was scheduled to take place at the Four Seasons hotel in Damascus on Friday afternoon was canceled at the last minute because of “security concerns,” said Rana Hassan, a State Department official, though Ms. Leaf clarified that there was never any threat to the officials.
Mr. al-Shara’s group is conservative and follows tenets of political Islam, but it broke from Al Qaeda and the Islamic State years ago, and has even fought them. The rebel group has administered much of Syria’s opposition-held Idlib Province since 2017.
Officials within the group have laid out an ambitious plan for establishing a new government in Syria, and rebel leaders have assumed key government positions to oversee a period of transition until March 1, 2025. After that point, rebel leaders say, a caretaker government is to be installed in consultation with Syrians of all backgrounds, and a committee to create a new Syrian Constitution will be established.
The process of taking groups off various official terrorist lists in Washington can take months or years because of the web of agencies involved and the potential political costs to leaders making that decision.
The toppling of Mr. al-Assad’s government has also shifted Syria’s other diplomatic ties. It sharply diminishes Iran’s influence in the region, depriving it of a key Arab ally that for decades was critical to its defense strategy. Whether Russia will be able to maintain its military bases in western Syria, which have been crucial to its ability to project power in the Middle East, remains unclear.
Israeli soldiers have occupied Syrian territory in recent days, and the Israeli air force has destroyed significant Syrian military assets. Turkey could wield behind-the-scenes power in Damascus, with more influence than ever over the rebels who now control most of Syria and who have long benefited from Turkish assistance.
On Friday, Turkish officials said they were in touch with Mr. al-Shara to assist in the country’s creation of a new Constitution, pledged to assist the new government with its energy needs and called for increased efforts to destroy “terrorist” groups within Syria, like the Islamic State and Kurdish fighters.
For years, the Kurdish-led forces, who control northeastern Syria, have been America’s most reliable partner in Syria, liberating cities seized by the Islamic State. But Turkey has long seen the Kurdish forces in Syria as an enemy, allied with the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., in Turkey. That group has fought the Turkish state for decades and is considered a terrorist group by Turkey and the United States.
The post Senior U.S. Diplomats Meet With Governing Militias in Syria appeared first on New York Times.
