Western, Regional Powers Pledge to Support Syria Transition

 France's President Emmanuel Macron, Syria's Minister of Foreign Affairs Asaad al-Shibani and participants pose for a family photograph during the International Conference on Syria in Paris, France February 13, 2025. (Reuters)
France's President Emmanuel Macron, Syria's Minister of Foreign Affairs Asaad al-Shibani and participants pose for a family photograph during the International Conference on Syria in Paris, France February 13, 2025. (Reuters)
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Western, Regional Powers Pledge to Support Syria Transition

 France's President Emmanuel Macron, Syria's Minister of Foreign Affairs Asaad al-Shibani and participants pose for a family photograph during the International Conference on Syria in Paris, France February 13, 2025. (Reuters)
France's President Emmanuel Macron, Syria's Minister of Foreign Affairs Asaad al-Shibani and participants pose for a family photograph during the International Conference on Syria in Paris, France February 13, 2025. (Reuters)

Twenty regional and Western powers agreed in a joint statement on Thursday to do their utmost to help Syria's new authorities and shield the country during its fragile transition amid ongoing instability across the Middle East.

Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad Hassan al-Shibani led a delegation for a first trip to the European Union since the December overthrow of Syria's autocratic President Bashar al-Assad, and a few days after President Emmanuel Macron invited Syria's transitional President Ahmed al-Sharaa to France.

Al-Shibani did not address the media during the meeting.

Regional ministers, including from Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Lebanon, were joined by Western partners at the gathering, though the US had only a low-level diplomatic presence.

The meeting aimed to coordinate efforts to ensure Syria's sovereignty and security through its transition, and mobilize its main neighbors and partners for aid and economic support.

"We want Syria to stop being used to destabilize the region. On the contrary, we want the Syrians to be able to focus today on the success of the transition and the recovery of their country," French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said at the start of the meeting.

In a statement agreed by 20 countries, including Syria, most Arab and Western states, but excluding the United States as diplomats said the administration was still defining policy, the participants said they would work to "ensure the success of the post-Assad transition in the framework of a process that is Syrian-led and Syria-owned in the spirit of the fundamental principles of UN Security Council resolution 2254."

They would also "provide the support it requires to ensure terrorist groups cannot re-establish a safe haven in Syrian territory."

The meeting did not aim to raise funds, which will be left to an annual pledging conference in Brussels on March 17, but issues such as the lifting of sanctions imposed on Syria during Assad's iron-fisted rule were to be discussed.

The EU agreed in principle last month to lift sanctions but there has been no follow-through due to Greek and Cypriot objections to maritime boundary talks between Syria and Türkiye that affect waters claimed by Greece and Cyprus.

Greece and Cyprus also want assurances that sanctions could be restored quickly, two diplomats said.

They said they were hopeful a compromise could be reached this month. Barrot said sanctions-lifting was a work in progress and German counterpart Annalena Baerbock said it would be done "step by step".

Ahead of the meeting, the main international aid donors met in Paris to take stock of Syria's humanitarian situation, notably in the northeast, where the impact of US aid cuts has had a "terrifying" impact, according to a European official.

The agreed to establish a working group under UN auspices to coordinate their future efforts, Barrot said.

France will provide 50 million euros ($52.1 million) in 2025 to help stabilize Syria, Barrot said.

Speaking at the conference, French President Emmanuel Macron said Paris was ready to do more to help the country tackle terrorist groups and urged the transition to consider working with the Western-led Inherent Resolve operation in neighboring Iraq to fight ISIS.



Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

 Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
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Families of Disappeared in Syria Want the Search to Continue on Conflict’s 14th Anniversary

 Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)
Family members hold pictures of their relatives who disappeared in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war, during a protest calling on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them, in the city of Daraa, Syria, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (AP)

Family members of Syrians who disappeared in the 14-year civil war on Sunday gathered in the city of Daraa and called on the interim government to not give up on efforts to find them.

The United Nations in 2021 estimated that over 130,000 Syrians were taken away and disappeared, many of them detained by Bashar al-Assad's network of intelligence agencies, as well as by opposition fighters and the extremist ISIS group. Advocacy group The Syrian Campaign says some 112,000 are still missing to this day.

When opposition led by group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham overthrew President Bashar Assad in April, they stormed prisons and released detainees from the ousted government's dungeons.

Families of the missing quickly rushed to the prisons seeking their loved ones. While there were some reunions, rescue services also discovered mass graves around the country and used whatever remains they could retrieve to identify the dead.

Wafa Mustafa held a placard of her father, Ali, who was detained by the Assad government's security forces in 2013. She fled a week later to Germany, fearing she would also be detained, and hasn't heard from him since.

Like many other Syrians who fled the conflict or went into exile for their activism, she often held protests and rallied in European cities. Now, she has returned twice since Assad's ouster, trying to figure out her father's whereabouts.

“I’m trying, feeling both hope and despair, to find any answer on the fate of my father,” she told The Associated Press. “I searched inside the prisons, the morgues, the hospitals, and through the bodies of the martyrs, but I still couldn’t find anything.”

A United Nations-backed commission on Friday urged the government led by interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa to preserve evidence and anything they can document from prisons in the ongoing search for the disappeared and to pursue perpetrators.

Some foreign nationals are missing in Syria as well, notably American journalist Austin Tice, whose mother visited Syria in January and met with al-Sharaa. Tice has not been heard from other than a video released weeks after his disappearance in 2012 that showed him blindfolded and held by armed men.

Syria’s conflict started as one of the popular uprisings of the so-called 2011 Arab Spring, before Assad crushed the largely peaceful protests and a civil war erupted. Half a million people have been killed and more than 5 million left the country as refugees.