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PARIS: Western powers are looking to establish contact with Syria’s new rulers, aiming to avoid Iraq- or Libya-style chaos after the fall of the Assad regime to the opposition.
Europe’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas was heading to Damascus on Monday, after a number of countries, including the United States, announced they had made initial approaches.
The situation in Syria, long allied with Iran and Russia, remains volatile and Western nations are wary of the Al-Qaeda roots of Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) that seized power in a lightning offensive.
But none wants to pass up the opportunity to forge links, given the risk of fragmentation and resurgence of Daesh, which has never been completely eradicated.
“The first reaction of the West has without a doubt been to say that they don’t meet terrorists,” said Denis Bauchard, from the French Institute of International Relations.
HTS, which has its roots in Al-Qaeda, maintains it has renounced extremism yet remains proscribed as a terrorist group by several Western countries, including the United States.
“But there’s a political reality... and clearly a race to establish contact the fastest,” added Bauchard, a former ambassador.
“The main objective,” he added, is that Syria does not fall into “total chaos.”
As well as Brussels and Washington, Paris plans to send a diplomatic mission to Damascus from Tuesday, to “retake possession” of French real estate and make “initial contact” with the new authorities.
Spain is to appoint a special envoy while the UK has announced that diplomatic contacts have been established with HTS.
“Europeans waited for the American reaction, which encouraged them to take the step,” said Hasni Abidi, director of the Study and Research Center for the Arab and Mediterranean World in Geneva (CERMAM).
The approach was “pragmatic” while the Syrian people welcomed the militants, he added.
“It was necessary to be among the first to show the Europeans’ willingness to help the Syrian people” and to have “a position of choice by offering not legitimacy but a certain respectability to HTS which has de facto authority status.”
Diplomats are not hiding the difficulties, with Syria at risk of fragmentation and from extremists, the outgoing French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said in Brussels Monday.
In his first comments since his flight from Damascus, Bashir Assad said on Monday that Syria was now “in the hands of terrorists.”
He also insisted he had not planned to leave when the militants took the capital and that his evacuation from the city was requested by Moscow.
Europe has several levers at its disposal, including financial reconstruction aid and the eventual lifting of sanctions to push Syria’s new authorities toward a political transition acceptable to the West.
Britain’s foreign minister David Lammy on Sunday said London had “diplomatic contact” to ensure that a “representative government” is established and stocks of chemical weapons secured.
Volker Perthes, from the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), said this weekend that it was in everyone’s interest to back a “UN-supported but Syrian-owned political process” for inclusive government.