DAMASCUS: Two weeks after seizing power in a sweeping offensive, Syria’s new leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa on Sunday said weapons in the country, including those held by Kurdish-led forces, would come under state control.
Sharaa spoke alongside Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, after earlier meeting with Lebanese Druze leaders and vowing to end “negative interference” in the neighboring country.
Ankara-backed rebels played a key role in supporting Sharaa’s Islamist group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), which headed a rebel alliance and seized Damascus on December 8, toppling longtime ruler Bashar Assad.
During a press conference with Fidan, Sharaa said Syria’s armed “factions will begin to announce their dissolution and enter” the army.
“We will absolutely not allow there to be weapons in the country outside state control, whether from the revolutionary factions or the factions present in the SDF area,” he added, referring to the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.
Sharaa — also known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammed Al-Jolani — traded in the olive-green military shirt he sported just days ago for a suit and tie during his meetings on Sunday at the presidential palace.
He also said “we are working on protecting sects and minorities from any attacks that occur between them” and from “external” actors exploiting the situation “to cause sectarian discord.”
“Syria is a country for all and we can coexist together,” he added.
Fidan said sanctions on Syria must “be lifted as soon as possible.” He called for the international community to “mobilize to help Syria get back on its feet and for the displaced people to return.”
Syria’s nearly 14-year civil war killed more than half a million people and displaced more than half its population, with many of them fleeing to neighboring countries, including three million in Turkiye.
Turkiye has maintained strong ties with Syria’s new leaders, and Ankara’s intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalin was in Damascus just four days after Assad fell.
Ankara has continued operations against Kurdish-held areas in northeastern Syria, with a Britain-based war monitor reporting on Saturday that Turkish drone strikes killed five civilians in the area.
A senior German diplomat, Tobias Tunkel, on Sunday said on X that he had spoken with SDF leader Mazloum Abdi about rising tensions in the Kurdish-held border town of Kobani “and urgent steps to diffuse them.”
On Friday a US diplomat in Damascus said Washington was urging a ceasefire between Turkish-backed forces and the SDF around Kobani.
Ankara regards the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the main component of the SDF, as being connected to the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) at home, which both Turkiye and Western allies deem a “terrorist” organization.

During his meeting with visiting Lebanese Druze chiefs Walid and Taymur Jumblatt, Sharaa said Syria would no longer engage in “negative interference in Lebanon at all.”
Syria “will stay at equal distance from all” in Lebanon, Sharaa added, acknowledging that Syria has been a “source of fear and anxiety” for its neighbor.
Walid Jumblatt, long a fierce critic of Assad and his father Hafez who ruled Syria before him, arrived in Damascus on Sunday at the head of a delegation of lawmakers from his parliamentary bloc and Druze religious figures.
The Druze religious minority is spread across Lebanon, Syria, Israel and Jordan.
Walid Jumblatt accuses the former Syrian authorities of having assassinated his father in 1977 during Lebanon’s civil war.
The Syrian army entered Lebanon in 1976, only leaving in 2005 after enormous pressure and mass protests following the assassination of former prime minister Rafic Hariri, a killing attributed to Damascus and its ally, Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah group.

Assad was an adherent of the Alawite offshoot of Shiite Islam and projected himself as a protector of the country’s religious and ethnic minorities.
The seizure of power by the Sunni Islamists of HTS — proscribed as a terrorist organization by many governments including the United States — has sparked concern, though the group has in recent years sought to moderate its image.
Despite worries over Syria’s future, global powers including the United States and the European Union have stepped up contacts with the war-ravaged country’s new leaders, urging them to guarantee protections for women and minorities.
The foreign leaders have also stressed the importance of combating “terrorism and extremism.”
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran — a major backer of Assad’s administration before it fell — on Sunday predicted “the emergence of a strong, honorable group” that would stand against “insecurity” in Syria.
Assad had long played a strategic role in Iran’s “axis of resistance,” a loose alliance of regional proxy forces aligned against Israel, particularly in facilitating the supply of weapons to Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon.
That axis has suffered heavy blows over the past year with Israel’s devastation of the leadership of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
Khamenei nonetheless denied that these armed groups acted as proxies, adding that: “If one day we want to take action, we do not need a proxy force.”
 

DAMASCUS: The visiting head of a UN investigative body for Syria said Sunday it was possible to find “more than enough” evidence to convict people of crimes against international law, but there was an immediate need to secure and preserve it.
The doors of Syria’s prisons were flung open after an Islamist-led rebel alliance ousted longtime ruler Bashar Assad this month, more than 13 years after his brutal repression of anti-government protests triggered a war that would kill more than 500,000 people.
With families rushing to former prisons, detention centers and alleged mass graves to find any trace of disappeared relatives, many have expressed concern about safeguarding documents and other evidence.
“We have the possibility here to find more than enough evidence left behind to convict those we should prosecute,” said Robert Petit, who heads the International Impartial and Independent Mechanism (IIIM) set up by the UN in 2016 to prepare prosecutions for major international crimes in Syria.
But he noted that preserving evidence would “need a lot of coordination between all the different actors.”
“We can all understand the human impulse to go in and try and find your loved ones,” Petit said. “The fact is, though, that there needs to be a control put in place to restrict access to all these different centers... It needs to be a concerted effort by everyone who has the resources and the powers to do that to freeze that access, preserve it.”
The organization, known as the Mechanism, was not permitted to work in Syria under Assad’s government but was able to document many crimes from abroad.
Since Assad’s fall, Petit has been able to visit the country but his team still require authorization to begin their work inside Syria which they have requested.
He said his team had “documented hundreds of detention centers... Every security center, every military base, every prison had their own either detention or mass graves attached to it.”
“We’re just now beginning to scratch that surface and I think it’s going to be a long time before we know the full extent of it,” he told AFP.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor, more than 100,000 people died in Syria’s jails and detention centers from 2011.
The Saydnaya complex, the site of extrajudicial executions, torture and forced disappearances, epitomised the atrocities committed against Assad’s opponents.
Petit compared Saydnaya to the S-21 prison in Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh, which came to stand for the Khmer Rouge’s wider atrocities and now houses the country’s genocide museum.
The Saydnaya facility will become “an emblematic example of inhumanity,” he said.
Petit said his team had reached out to the new authorities “to get permission to come here and start discussing a framework by which we can conduct our mandate.”
“We had a productive meeting and we’ve asked formally now, according to their instructions, to be able to come back and start the work. So we’re waiting for that response,” he said.
Even without setting foot in Syria, Petit’s 82-member team has gathered huge amounts of evidence of the worst breaches of international law committed during the war.
The hope is that there could now be a national accountability process in Syria and that steps could be taken to finally grant the International Criminal Court jurisdiction to prosecute crimes committed in the country.