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Ministers from 17 Middle East and western countries have met in Riyadh to discuss how to speed aid to the new Syrian government while keeping pressure on the caretaker leadership to meet its commitment to run an administration representative of all religions and ethnic groups.
The meeting on Sunday came as protesters in Syria called on the west to move faster on lifting economic sanctions, and so persuade more refugees to return from Europe and the states surrounding the country.
The US last week eased some restrictions on emergency humanitarian aid and some energy supplies, which allowed Qatar to send a sea tanker of gas to Syria on Sunday.
Neither Russia nor Iran, the dominant external powers under the former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, were invited to the summit, which was also attended by Syria’s foreign minister, Asaad al-Shibani.
Saudi Arabia’s hosting of the event is regarded as significant since it shows Riyadh wants to play a leading role alongside Turkey and Qatar in rebuilding Syria. In the past Saudi Arabia and Turkey have backed different factions opposing Assad.
Western diplomats still believe Syria’s new leader and the head of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is sincere in promising to form a broader government by March. However, they fear that the unexpected success of his Islamist group’s military offensive in December has left Sharaa unprepared, and prone to mistakes. Some western diplomats are expecting that a proposed March power-transfer date will slip as he struggles to gather a consensus around how to provide democratic veneer to a new broader-based government and plans for a new constitution.
In a positive development, it was revealed that Sharaa had held a near three-hour meeting last week with the one-time official political opposition known as the Syrian National Coalition.
Some at the UN believe Syria needs as long as three years to prepare a new constitution and four years to stage elections. That is longer than the timetable set out in UN resolution 2254, which still governs thinking on a democratic transition.
There are worries at the composition of the courts being established by the government. “If the judges are all coming out of Idlib province [the base for HTS inside Syria] there will be a legitimacy issue,” a western diplomatic source said.
There is special concern at the integration of the military factions inside the Syrian government army, including the role of foreign fighters. And Qatar, concerned that tens of thousands of Alawites are about to lose public-sector jobs, has offered to help subsidise salaries.
“We are talking about hundreds of thousands of people. Al-Sharaa understands that this could be a challenge, but I don’t think he realises quite this could create the core of a new resistance to the transition,” a source said.
After the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, a civil war broke out during which tens of thousands of Sunni government employees were removed from payrolls by the US administration, leaving them disfranchised and marginalised.
Western diplomats are also concerned over whether Turkey is willing to let the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in north-east Syria come to an agreement with the Damascus government. Diplomats worry that Ankara is determined to continue to mount attacks on the SDF on the basis that within its ranks are Kurdish separatists from the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) who are committing acts of terrorism inside Turkey.
One diplomat said it was still not clear whether Ankara believed it would destroy Sharaa’s chances of success if Turkey mounted a full-scale attack on the SDF or if a necessary condition for him to succeed was that he defeated the SDF.
Leaders of the SDF have been calling on Donald Trump and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, to provide troops to protect Syrian Kurds from continued Turkish militia attacks.
Sharaa is said to be determined that the Syrian Kurds do not use decentralisation of Syria as a means of blocking oil revenues reaching the central government or establishing a separate Kurdish military faction inside an integrated national army.
The Riyadh meeting reviewed the US decision to ease restrictions on humanitarian aid for six months, and European plans to take similar steps probably at the end of the month.
The German foreign, Annalena Baerbock, who was at the meeting, said: “Syrians now need a quick dividend from the transition of power, and we continue to help those in Syria who have nothing, as we have done all the years of civil war, we will provide another €50m [£42m] for food, emergency shelters and medical care.”
The EU foreign affairs chief, Kaja Kallas, said possible priorities for relief included sanctions that were “hindering the building up of a country, and access to banking services”.
“If we see the developments going to the right direction we are ready to do the next steps,” she said, adding that there also had to be “a fallback position”.
But the scale of devastation and poverty inside Syria, estimated to cost as much as $500bn (£410bn), leaves the Syrian government vulnerable if the current euphoria after the fall of Assad gives way to frustration or sectarianism.
Arab ministers who met separately in Riyadh before western foreign ministers joined the meeting have already been pouring aid into Syria, but in an ad hoc manner, and with fewer demands being placed on the Syrian government.
The continued designation of HTS as a terrorist organisation makes it difficult for foreign banks to cooperate with the Syrian central bank. Joe Biden has left it to Trump to decide whether to lift the terrorist designation from HTS while Sharaa has said he will disband the organisation.
