The UK could remove the ban on Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Islamist group that led the Syrian rebel alliance and ousted President Bashar al-Assad, British senior minister Pat McFadden said on Monday.
“We will consider that. And I think it will partly depend on what happens in terms of how that group behaves now,” McFadden told Sky News, when asked if the British government would look at the proscription of HTS again.
HTS, a former al-Qaeda affiliate, is a proscribed organisation in the UK, meaning that Britain, like other Western nations including the U.S., designates it as a terrorist group, making it illegal to support or join it.
“I think it should be a relatively swift decision, so it’s something that will have to be considered quite quickly, given the speed of the situation on the ground,” he told BBC Radio.
McFadden, a senior member of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s cabinet of ministers, said no decisions on HTS had been taken over the weekend, after rebels led by the group seized the Syrian capital Damascus and al-Assad fled to Russia.
International governments including Britain’s have welcomed the end of Assad’s autocratic government, which marks one of the biggest turning points for the Middle East in generations.
The lightning advance of a militia alliance spearheaded by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a former al Qaeda affiliate, was a generational turning point for West Asia.
It ends a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, caused one of the biggest refugee crises of modern times and left cities bombed to rubble, swathes of countryside depopulated and the economy hollowed out by global sanctions. Millions of refugees could finally go home from camps across Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.
Assad ‘s fall in Syria wipes out one of the main bastions from which Iran and Russia wielded power across the region while Turkey, long aligned with rebels, emerges strengthened, while Israel hailed it as an outcome of its blows to Assad’s Iranian-backed allies.
The Arab world faces the challenge of reintegrating one of West Asia’s central states, while containing the militant Sunni Islam that underpinned the anti-Assad revolt but has also metastasized into the horrific sectarian violence of Islamic State.
HTS is still designated as a terrorist group by the United Nations and most countries, but has spent years trying to soften its image and distance itself from its al Qaeda roots to reassure foreign states and minority groups within Syria.
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