Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – President Trump met the new leader of Syria on Wednesday, praising him as an “attractive young guy” and the pressing to rid his country of “Palestinian terrorists”.
Trump also urged the acting president Syrian Ahmad al-Sharaa to connect to the historic agreements of Abraham negotiated during the first term of Trump.
The meeting in Riyadh came as Trump concluded the Saudi leg for his trip from the Middle East and headed for Qatar, the second destination for what has so far been a heavy visit to the region's opulence.
The meeting with Al-Sharaa, which lasted approximately half an hour and was the first time in a quarter of a century that the leaders of the two nations met, won an important victory for the emerging government of Al-Sharaa, one day after Trump's decision to raise longtime sanctions from the country tidy by the war.
He also gives legitimacy to a leader whose past as a jihadist chief affiliated to Al -Qaeda – Al -Sharaa cut links with the group in 2016 – had made the Western nations maintain him remotely.
The sanctions were imposed on Syria in 2011, when the president now filed Bashar Assad began a brutal repression to repress anti-government uprisings.
Al-Sharaa directed an Islamist rebellious coalition which overthrew Assad in December, but the Trump administration and other Western governments conditioned the lifting of sanctions with regard to its government fulfilling certain conditions.
However, as it is his custom, Trump crossed the protocol and relied on personal relations, raising the sanctions at the request of the request of the Saudi heiress Mohammed Bin Salman and the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a long -standing supporter of the rebellion of Syria, who joined the phone meeting.
Speaking on Air Force One on the way to Qatar, Trump described Al-Sharaa as an “attractive young guy. A hard guy. Past strong. Past very strong. Fighter ”.
“He has a real shot to keep him together,” added Trump. “I spoke with President Erdogan, who is very friendly with him. He feels that he has a chance to do a good job. It is a torn country. “
According to a reading shared by the press secretary of the White House, Karoline Leavitt, on X, Trump urged Al-Sharaa to connect to the Abraham agreements, to tell the “foreign terrorists” to leave Syria and to deport “Palestinian terrorists”, to help the United States prevent thousands of people from the Islamic State and the responsibility of the detention centers.
Abraham's agreements were the centerpiece of the achievements of Trump's foreign policy during his first mandate. Brégués in 2020, they established diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan – without conditioning them on the Palestinian State or Israeli concessions to the Palestinians.
Under Assad, Syria maintained a truce old decades with Israel, despite the accommodation of several Palestinian factions and allowed Iran and affiliated groups to operate in the country.
