DAMASCUS, Syria\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa arrived in New York on Sunday to take part in the United Nations General Assembly, the first president of Syria to do so in nearly six decades.<\/p>\n
The last time a Syrian head of state attended the General Assembly was in 1967. That was before the half-century rule of the Assad family dynasty, which came to an end in December when President Bashar Assad was ousted in a lightning insurgent offensive led by Al-Sharaa. Assad\u2019s fall also brought to an end nearly 14 years of civil war.<\/p>\n
Since then, Al-Sharaa has sought to restore ties with Arab countries and the West, where officials were initially wary of his past ties with Al Qaeda. The rebel group he formerly led, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, was previously designated by the United States as a terrorist organization.<\/p>\n
Since assuming power, Al-Sharaa has preached coexistence and sought to reassure Syria\u2019s minority communities, but the country\u2019s fragile recovery has been threatened by outbreaks of sectarian violence. Fighters affiliated with the new government were also accused of killing hundreds of civilians from the Druze and Alawite religious minorities.<\/p>\n
Along with his appearance at the U.N. General Assembly, Al-Sharaa is likely to use his visit to push for further sanctions relief for Syria as it attempts to rebuild its war-battered economy and infrastructure.<\/p>\n
President Trump met with Al-Sharaa in Saudi Arabia in May and announced that he would lift decades of sanctions imposed on Syria under the Assads\u2019 rule.<\/p>\n
He followed through by ordering a large swath of sanctions lifted or waived. However, the most stringent sanctions were imposed by Congress under the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act passed in 2019 and will require a congressional vote to permanently remove them.<\/p>\n
Another topic that will loom large during Al-Sharaa\u2019s visit is his country\u2019s relations with U.S. ally Israel. Since Assad\u2019s fall, Israel has been suspicious of Al-Sharaa\u2019s government and has seized a formerly U.N.-patrolled buffer zone in southern Syria and launched hundreds of airstrikes on Syrian military sites and its Defense Ministry headquarters.<\/p>\n
Negotiations have been underway for a security deal that Al-Sharaa has said he hopes will bring about a withdrawal of Israeli forces and return to a 1974 disengagement agreement. While Al-Sharaa said last week that a deal could be reached in a matter of days, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in remarks Sunday appeared to downplay the odds of a breakthrough.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is some progress\u201d but the deal is \u201cstill a vision for the future,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Also on Sunday, Syrian election officials announced that the country\u2019s first parliamentary elections since the fall of Assad will take place Oct. 5. The members of the People\u2019s Assembly will not be chosen via a direct popular vote, however, but through an electoral college system with electoral bodies in each province voting for two-thirds of the seats, while Al-Sharaa will directly appoint one-third.<\/p>\n
Officials have said that holding direct elections at this stage would be too logistically challenging since many Syrians have lost personal documentation or are living as refugees abroad after years of civil war. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DAMASCUS, Syria\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa arrived in New York on Sunday to take part in the United Nations…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":245782,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[61739,5229,130660,61741,16949,4572,61740,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,116528,130661,1404,23312,130663,130662,67,586,132,5230,68,2969,1804,1628],"class_list":{"0":"post-245781","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-al-sharaa","9":"tag-america","10":"tag-arab-country","11":"tag-assad","12":"tag-fall","13":"tag-hundred","14":"tag-new-government","15":"tag-new-york","16":"tag-new-york-city","17":"tag-newyork","18":"tag-newyorkcity","19":"tag-ny","20":"tag-nyc","21":"tag-sanction","22":"tag-security-deal","23":"tag-sunday","24":"tag-syria","25":"tag-syrian-president","26":"tag-u-n-general-assembly","27":"tag-united-states","28":"tag-united-states-of-america","29":"tag-unitedstates","30":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","31":"tag-us","32":"tag-usa","33":"tag-visit","34":"tag-year"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115246730049138827","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245781"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245781\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/245782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}