US lifts $10m bounty on HTS leader after talks in Syrian capital | Syria

The US has lifted a $10m bounty on Ahmed al-Sharaa, the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the strongest force to emerge in Syria after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, after the first face-to-face meeting between American diplomats and the HTS leadership.

Barbara Leaf, the state department’s senior diplomat for the Middle East, said Sharaa had given assurances in the meeting in Damascus that Islamic State (IS) and other terrorist groups would not be allowed to operate in Syrian territory.

Leaf said the US delegation informed Sharaa, formerly known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, that Washington would no longer offer the $10m reward for his capture, noting later that the bounty would complicate efforts to talk to the HTS leader.

“It was a policy decision … aligned with the fact that we are beginning a discussion with HTS,” she said. “So if I’m sitting with the HTS leader and having a lengthy detailed discussion about the interests of the US, interests of Syria, maybe interests of the region, it’s suffice to say a little incoherent then to have a bounty on the guy’s head.”

Leaf was accompanied in Damascus by the presidential envoy for hostage affairs, Roger Carstens, and Daniel Rubinstein, a senior adviser who has been put in charge of handling US relations with the new forces running Syria.

The diplomats raised questions about the whereabouts of Austin Tice, an American journalist who went missing in Syria in 2012, as well as Majd Kamalmaz, a Syrian-American psychotherapist, and other US citizens who disappeared during Assad’s rule. The US has not had diplomatic relations with Syria since closing its embassy in 2012.

Another of the issues on the table in Damascus on Friday was the future of Syria’s Kurds, who have been longstanding US allies in combating Islamic State (IS) in the region. A state department spokesperson confirmed that the “imperative” of the fight against IS had been discussed, but did not give any more specifics.

Washington’s Nato ally Turkey has called on other outside powers to cut their support for the Kurdish militia in northern Syria, the People’s Defence Units (YPG), which make up the core of the counter-IS alliance, the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

The Pentagon revealed on Thursday it had 2,000 troops inside Syria, more than twice the number previously reported. The defence department said the surge in the military presence was temporary and had happened in recent months.

The YPG has links with the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), which Turkey labels as a terrorist organisation.

Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said on Thursday: “In the upcoming period we do not believe that any power will continue to collaborate with terrorist organisations. The heads of terrorist organisations such as Islamic State and PKK-YPG will be crushed in the shortest possible time.”

As rebel forces closed in on Damascus in the first week of December, Turkey and the Syrian militia it backs used the opportunity to launch attacks on Kurdish positions.

Donald Trump, who is due to return to the Oval Office next month, has questioned why the US needs to stay in Syria. In 2019, during his first term, Trump ordered a withdrawal of US forces from Syria, in the face of determined resistance from the Pentagon and the Washington security establishment.

Ultimately, a residual US presence was left in the region, but Trump has been insistent since Assad’s fall on 8 December that the US should have no role. “This is not our fight,” the president-elect said on social media.

Carstens, speaking on Friday about efforts to find Tice in the aftermath of the Assad regime’s fall, said the US was calling for investigations of possible sites where the missing journalist may have been detained.

“Over 12 years we’ve been able to pinpoint about six facilities that we believe have a high possibility of having had Austin Tice at one point or another,” he said.

“We’ve tried to focus on those six, because we have limited resources. And since state cannot be on the ground, nor can the FBI for an extended amount of time right now, we’ve been working with our our partners, allies, NGOs and even members of the media to take a look at these facilities and give us a sense of what they’re seeing, what they’re finding.”

The outgoing Biden administration believes it is close to brokering an elusive ceasefire in Gaza but there was no news of a breakthrough on Friday, when the estimated Palestinian death toll passed 45,000. Among the dead on Friday, according to local health officials, were seven people, including four children, killed in an Israeli airstrike on a building in the Nuseirat refugee camp.