Interim Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa, last March 9. (Credit: AFP)
Interim Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa said Friday that Syria is holding negotiations with Israel to reach a security agreement that would allow Israel to withdraw from areas it has occupied since the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in December.
When Islamist-led forces toppled former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime on Dec. 8, Israel deployed troops in the U.N.-monitored buffer zone on the Golan Heights, which has separated Israeli and Syrian forces since the armistice following the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Since then, Israel has carried out hundreds of airstrikes on military targets in Syria and conducted incursions into southern Syria. The new Syrian authorities have not responded.
“We are currently in a state of negotiations and dialogue on the issue of a security agreement,” al-Sharaa said in an interview with the state-run Alekhbariah television channel. “Israel considered that with the fall of the regime, Syria had abandoned” the 1974 disengagement agreement, “even though Syria, from the very first moment, expressed its commitment” to that agreement, he said. “Now, negotiations are underway on a security agreement to bring Israel back to where it was before Dec. 8,” he continued.
Israel and Syria have no diplomatic relations, the two countries having technically been at war since 1948, with Damascus never accepting Israel’s occupation, and later annexation, of part of the Golan Heights. Last month, Syrian state media reported that Syrian Foreign Minister Assaad al-Shaibani and his Israeli counterpart Ron Dermer had met in Paris to discuss de-escalation and the situation in the Syrian province of Sweida, which has a Druze majority and has been scarred by intercommunal violence — with Israel intervening in support of the Druze. Also in August, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel was engaged in talks aimed at demilitarizing southern Syria.
During the interview, Ahmad al-Sharaa also revealed that his forces had begun secret negotiations with Russia, Bashar al-Assad’s key ally, during the offensive that eventually toppled the dictator, who had ruled since 2000. “When we reached Hama during the liberation battle, negotiations took place between us and Russia,” al-Sharaa said. When Islamist forces reached Homs, further south, Russia “stayed out of the fighting … under an agreement concluded between us,” he added. He also stressed that his forces had deliberately avoided attacking the Russian Hmeimim airbase on Syria’s Mediterranean coast.
Russia’s naval base at Tartus and its Hmeimim airbase are Moscow’s only official military outposts outside the former Soviet Union. Bashar al-Assad fled from Hmeimim to Russia.
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