NEW YORK TIMES
The State Department said early Friday that three senior American diplomats had arrived in Damascus, the capital of Syria, to meet with leaders of the militias that have seized control of the country, and to look for signs of the journalist Austin Tice and other missing U.S. citizens.
They are the first American diplomats to enter Damascus since the crumbling of the old government. They are seeking to learn about and help shape the political landscape of Syria after the rapid fall this month of Bashar al-Assad, the longtime autocratic leader who ordered his forces to carry out mass atrocities during the civil war that grew out of an uprising in 2011. The United States broke off diplomatic ties with Syria the next year.
The visit represents a tentative step toward engagement in Syria, a nation in which U.S. involvement 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 directly to engage, partly because the United States designated a precursor of the lead rebel group as terrorists.
The diplomats “will be engaging directly with the Syrian people, including members of civil society, activists, members of different communities and other Syrian voices about their vision for the future of their country and how the United States can help support them,” the State Department said in a statement.
The officials are Barbara Leaf, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs; Roger D. Carstens, the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs; and Daniel Rubinstein, the new special adviser on Syria.
The agency said the diplomats plan to discuss with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the most powerful militia, the “transition principles” that American, Arab and Turkish officials had agreed upon 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.
“We laid out together some principles for what we expect going forward in Syria if what emerges in Syria wants to have the recognition, the support that it’s going to need from the international community,” Antony J. Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, said at a public talk at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on Wednesday. “So I think that was a very useful exercise in kind of laying out those expectations, the principles that we put out.”
The leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, has said in interviews that his group plans to have an inclusive process and does not seek to harm non-Muslims in Syria. The group is conservative and follows tenets of political Islam, but it broke from Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, two militant organizations, years ago, and it has even fought them.
It is unclear how the American diplomats would engage with Mr. al-Jolani or Ahmed al-Shara, the leader of the rebel coalition that went on the offensive against Mr. al-Assad. President Barack Obama designated a precursor of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham a terrorist group, though that does not make it illegal for U.S. diplomats to meet with the current group. Its leaders have urged the United States to drop the designation, while U.S. officials have said they are watching the group’s actions closely.
A main reason for the designation was the precursor group, the Nusra Front, had begun using terrorist tactics in the civil war, including setting off a pair of deadly car bombs in Damascus in December 2011. Robert Ford, the U.S. ambassador to Syria at the time, pushed for the designation.
Mr. Ford said in an interview with The New York Times this month that the Biden administration should consider taking Hayat Tahrir al-Sham off the list of terrorist organizations. While governing Idlib Province in recent years, he said, the group has shown a tolerance for Christians and allowed them to rebuild churches.
The Biden administration has also found Hayat Tahrir al-Sham willing to help in the search for Mr. Tice, who was abducted in Damascus in 2012, and has given the group a list of former Assad government officials who might have knowledge of him. President Biden has said he believes Mr. Tice is still alive and in Syria.
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