The meeting comes as the new authorities seek to reassure minorities of their safety in a post-Assad Syria.
Syria’s de facto leader Ahmed al-Sharaa met with senior Christian clerics on Tuesday, amid calls for the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) to guarantee minority rights after taking power earlier this month.
“The leader of the new Syrian administration, Ahmed al-Sharaa, meets with a delegation of the Christian community in Damascus,” the Syrian High Command announced on Telegram.
Pictures of the meeting with Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican clergymen were published in the press release.
Earlier on Tuesday, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot called for an inclusive political transition in Syria that guarantees the rights of the country’s diverse communities.
He expressed hope that “Syrians could regain control over their own.” own destiny“.
But for that to happen, the country needs “a political transition in Syria that includes all communities in their diversity, that upholds the most basic rights and fundamental freedoms,” Barrot said during a visit to Lebanon with Defense Minister Sebastien Lecornu.
Barrot and Lecornu also met with Lebanese army chief Joseph Aoun and visited United Nations peacekeepers patrolling the southern border, where a fragile truce it ended the intense fighting between Israel and Hezbollah at the end of November.
‘Positive’ talks with the SDF
Since taking power, Syria’s new leadership, led by al-Shar’a, a former member of al-Qaida, has repeatedly tried to reassure minorities that they would not be harmed, although some isolated incidents have sparked protests.
On December 25, thousands protested in several areas of Syria after a video circulating showing an attack on an Alawite shrine in the north of the country.
A day earlier, hundreds of protesters took to the streets in Christian areas of Damascus to protest against the burning of a Christmas tree near Hama in central Syria.
Before civil war broke out in 2011, Syria was home to about a million Christians, according to analyst Fabrice Balanche, who says their numbers have dwindled to about 300,000.
Earlier, a Syrian official told the AFP news agency that al-Sharaa held “positive” talks with envoys of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) on Monday.
The talks were al-Sharaa’s first with SDF commanders since his rebels overthrew longtime ruler Bashar al-Assad in early December, and came at a time when the SDF is preoccupied with fighting Turkish-backed factions in northern Syria.
The United States-backed SDF led a military campaign that pushed ISIL (ISIS) fighters from their last territory in Syria in 2019.
Ali Turkiye, who has long had ties to al-Sharaa’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group, says the SDF is led by members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has led a four-decade insurgency against the Turkish state and is designated a “terrorist” group in Turkey and the USA.
On Sunday, al-Sharaa told Al Arabiya television that the SDF should be integrated into the new national army.
“Weapons must only be in the hands of the state. Whoever is armed and qualified to join the defense ministry, we will welcome him,” he said.
