US not ruling out reopening embassy in Damascus

“We don’t have an embassy in Syria. It’s operating out of Turkey, but we need to help them,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday.

He stated US embassy staff in Turkey would assist the new Syrian officials in determining what type of assistance they will need to move forward in rebuilding the country.

In a surprise move, President Donald Trump announced the lifting of all sanctions on Syria during a trip to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, last week. Syria had been consistently under some measure of US sanctions for more than 40 years.

Trump also met with Sharaa in Riyadh and stated he was impressed by the leader, a former al-Qaeda fighter who fought against US forces in Iraq.

“It’s entirely driven by security concerns,” Rubio said of the continued suspension of embassy operations.

He added, “It’s not the transitional authorities. We don’t think they would harm us, but there are other elements on the ground in Syria.”

Those elements could be referencing Alawis whose loyalty in some cases remains to former President Bashar al-Assad, who fled Syria in December 2024 as rebels advanced on Damascus, as well as holdouts from anti-Assad and Islamic State-aligned militant groups who have refused to join the ranks of the new unified Syrian army.

“We have all kinds of requirements that are there for a reason. If someone is hurt, do you have a medical evacuation plan? Can you secure a facility from an attack from an armed group, many of whom are still running loose in the country? Unfortunately, it’s one of the fundamental challenges the transitional authority is facing,” Rubio told lawmakers.

While Sharaa’s government is not currently assessed as a threat to US interests, “the transitional authority figures, they didn’t pass their background check with the FBI”, Rubio added.

“They’ve got a tough history… But on the flip side of it, if we engage them, it may work out [or] it may not work out. If we did not engage them, it is guaranteed to not work out.”

Rubio met with Syria’s Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani in talks hosted by Turkey last week. Three weeks ago, Shaibani was also given a visa to come to the United Nations headquarters in New York and raise the new Syrian flag there.

Rubio said if the Trump administration had not engaged with Sharaa’s government and pushed for sanctions relief, Syria would have been “maybe weeks, not many months, away from potential collapse and a full-scale civil war of epic proportions. Basically, the country splitting up”.

“The good news is that there is a Syrian national identity,” he continued, adding, “It is one of the places in the Middle East where Alawites and Druze and Christians and Sunni and Shia and Kurds have lived alongside each other, underneath the banner of a Syrian identity, until it was broken by a butcher, Assad.”

The lifting of the sanctions, Rubio said, is primarily designed to allow neighbouring countries to assist Sharaa’s team, and “to build governance mechanisms that allow them to actually establish a government [and] unify the armed forces”.

That, however, will not be enough, he stated.

To attract much-needed foreign investment in Syria, the US will begin by issuing waivers under the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, which was signed into law during Trump’s first term in 2019.

However, waivers have expiry dates, and until further progress is made by the interim government, that seems to be the extent to which the US will issue relief.

“I don’t think the issue with them right now is a matter of willingness or lack of willingness. It’s a lack of capability,” Rubio said of Sharaa’s efforts to rein in armed factions.

For Washington, there’s also the crucial matter of its primary partner in the region, Israel.

“We’ve had conversations with them about this, what we view as an opportunity for Israel, if, in fact, Syria is stable and has in it a government that has no interest… in fighting a war,” Rubio told lawmakers.

He added there have been some assurances from Damascus.

“Obviously, you have to prove it, but they have said this is a nationalist project. They are seeking to build a nation. They’re not viewing themselves as a launch pad for revolution. They’re not viewing themselves as a launch pad for attacks against Israel.”

Israel occupied Syria’s Golan Heights, where Sharaa’s family comes from, in 1967, and today, Trump recognises it as Israeli territory despite the UN asserting its illegality.

When Assad’s reign collapsed, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered troops into the Golan Heights buffer zone “to ensure that no hostile force embeds itself right next to the border of Israel”.

He also ordered the bombing of dozens of sites across Syria that he maintained were weapons caches for Hezbollah, an ally of Assad.