The Syrian Presidency denies statements made by the former US ambassador to Damascus regarding previous meetings between him and al Sharaa regarding his political rehabilitation in 2023

A source in the Syrian presidency told Qatar based, Al Jazeera channel, that information provided by former US Ambassador to Damascus, Robert Ford about meetings with President Ahmed al Sharaa in Idlib back in 2023 is false.

The aforementioned meetings were part of meetings with hundreds of delegations and were dedicated to presenting the Idlib experience.

One of the delegations belonged to a British research organization and included Ambassador Robert Ford.

The sessions were limited to general questions about the experience and didn’t include what Ford had stated in his statements.

It’s worth noting that the former US Ambassador to Damascus Robert Ford revealed an indirect US role in rehabilitating Syrian President Ahmed al Sharaa through a series of meetings that began in 2023, during his tenure as leader of Hay’at Tahrir al Sham (HTS) “Abu Muhammad al Julani” before he assumed the presidency of Syria.

Ford said his participation came as part of a European team selected by a British non-governmental organization specializing in conflict resolution, to work on transferring Ahmed al Sharaa “from the world of terrorism to the world of politics,” noting that these efforts were part of a broader Western political rehabilitation process.

The former US ambassador explained, “I was in Iraq between 2000 and 2003, and during that period, this man was a prominent leader in al Qaeda in northern Iraq… Starting in 2023, a British NGO specializing in conflict resolution invited me to help them extract him from the world of terrorism and bring him into politics”.

Ford confirmed that his first meeting with Sharaa was in March 2023, describing the conversation as “civilized”.

According to Ford, they met again in September on the same year (2023), culminating in a third meeting last January at the Presidential Palace in Damascus, after al Sharaa assumed his presidential post.

According to Ford, the three meetings alone weren’t sufficient to rehabilitate al Sharaa politically, but they were the culmination of a long process that began when al Sharaa announced in 2016 that his organization had split from al Qaeda and sought to present himself in a more moderate light within the context of the protests against the Assad regime.