Syria’s newly appointed Foreign Minister Asaad Hassan al-Shibani arrived in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday leading a delegation on the new regime’s first official visit abroad, Syrian state news agency SANA reported, citing a foreign ministry source.
The delegation includes Defence Minister Murhaf Abu Qasra.
The visit to Saudi Arabia came less than a month after Bashar al-Assad was ousted by rebels in Syria on Dec. 8.
Meanwhile, last Sunday, Syria‘s de facto leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, said that polls could take up in the war-torn country to four years, marking his first comments on a potential electoral timetable since Bashar al-Assad’s ousting.
Drafting a new constitution could take up to three years, Sharaa said in an interview with the Saudi state-owned broadcaster Al Arabiya. He also said it would take about a year for Syrians to see drastic changes.
Syrian Conflict
The comment regarding polls in Syria from Sharaa, who leads the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group that ousted Assad on Dec. 8, comes as the new government in Damascus has been seeking to reassure its neighbours that it has moved away from its roots in Islamist militancy.
The group’s lightning campaign ended a 13-year civil war but has left a host of questions about the future of a multi-ethnic country where foreign states including Turkey and Russia have strong and potentially competing interests.
The country’s new rulers appointed Murhaf Abu Qasra, a leading figure in the insurgency that toppled Bashar al-Assad, as defence minister in the interim government.
Syria’s historic ethnic and religious minorities include Muslim Kurds and Shi’ites – who feared during the civil war that any future Sunni Islamist rule would imperil their way of life – as well as Syriac, Greek and Armenian Orthodox Christians, and the Druze community.
Sharaa has told Western officials visiting him that the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group he heads, a former al Qaeda affiliate, will neither seek revenge against the former regime nor repress any religious minority.
(With inputs from Reuters)
