PARIS (Reuters) – France raised the flag on Tuesday over its embassy in Damascus 12 years after cutting ties with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad amid the country’s civil war, with its diplomats meeting an official from the transitional team, the foreign ministry said.
Without naming who they met, the ministry said a team of French diplomats met an official of the country’s new governing authorities in the Syrian capital on Tuesday.
“It informed him that France wished for the Syrians – in accordance with the ideals of the 2011 revolution that it supported – a peaceful political transition, representative of all components of Syrian society,’ a ministry statement said.
The diplomats also said Paris would be attentive to collective security issues, notably the fight against Islamic State and other terrorist groups as well as the fate of the Assad government’s chemical weapons’ stocks, the ministry said.
“The mission visited the French embassy, which had been closed since 2012, in order to work on reopening our diplomatic presence in Syria, depending on the political and security conditions,” the statement said.
France has welcomed Assad’s fall but is considering whether it can work with the rebels that ousted him including Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an Islamist group that is designated a terrorist organisation by the EU.
French diplomats say they want to see how the group approaches the transition before making big decisions such as on sanctions, the lifting of the designation of HTS as a terrorist group and ultimately providing financial support for Syria.
Since cutting ties with Assad in 2012, France has not sought to normalise ties with Syria’s government and has backed a broadly secular exiled opposition and Kurdish forces in northeastern Syria.
The ministry said the diplomats had also met representatives of civil society in Damascus to offer resources to provide medical and psychological support to detainees released from the regime’s prisons.
It also met representatives from the various Syrian communities, the ministry said.
(Reporting by John Irish; Editing by William Maclean)
