Syrian president Sharaa expected to visit Washington, US envoy says

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By Alexander Cornwell and Maya Gebeily

MANAMA/BEIRUT (Reuters) -Syrian President Ahmed Sharaa will visit Washington, U.S. Special Envoy to Syria Tom Barrack said on Saturday, in what would be the first visit by a Syrian head of state to the U.S. capital.

During the visit, Syria would “hopefully” join the U.S.-led coalition to defeat Islamic State, Barrack told reporters on the sidelines of the Manama Dialogue in Bahrain, an annual global security and geopolitical conference.

A Syrian source familiar with the matter said the visit was expected to take place within the next two weeks.

According to the U.S. State Department’s historical list of foreign leader visits, no previous Syrian president has paid an official visit to Washington. Sharaa addressed the U.N. General Assembly in New York in September.

Since seizing power from Bashar al-Assad last December, Sharaa has made a series of foreign trips as his transitional government seeks to re-establish Syria’s ties with world powers that had shunned Damascus during Assad’s rule.

Barrack said Washington was aiming to recruit Syria to join the coalition Washington has led since 2014 to fight against Islamic State, the militant group that controlled around a third of Syria and Iraq at its peak between 2014 and 2017.

“We are trying to get everybody to be a partner in this alliance, which is huge for them,” Barrack said.

Sharaa once led Syria’s offshoot of Al Qaeda, but a decade ago his anti-Assad rebel group broke away from the network founded by Osama bin Laden, and later clashed with Islamic State.

The U.S.-led coalition and its local partners drove Islamic State from its last stronghold in Syria in 2019. The group has been attempting to exploit the fall of the Assad regime to stage a comeback in Syria and neighbouring Iraq, sources told Reuters in June.

SYRIA-ISRAEL DE-ESCALATION TALKS

Barrack earlier told the summit that Syria and Israel continued to hold de-escalation talks, which the U.S. has been mediating. He told reporters that Syria and Israel were close to reaching an agreement but declined to say when exactly a deal could be reached.

Syria and Israel are in talks to reach an agreement that Damascus hopes will secure a halt to Israeli airstrikes and the withdrawal of Israeli troops who have pushed into southern Syria.

The Syrian source said the U.S. is pushing for a security agreement to be agreed with Israel by the time Sharaa visits Washington.

Israel and Syria have been Middle East adversaries for decades. Despite the overthrow of Assad last December, territorial disputes and deep-seated political mistrust between the two countries remain.

(Reporting by Alexander Cornwell in Manama and Maya Gebeily in Beirut; Additional reporting by Hatem Maher in Cairo; Editing by Hugh Lawson, Peter Graff)