Geneva, Switzerland—The armed groups that have swept Syrian president Bashar al-Assad from power must transform their “good messages” to Syrians into actions on the ground, the UN envoy for Syria said Tuesday.
After more than 13 years of civil war in Syria, the government’s collapse came in a matter of days in a lightning offensive by the Islamist rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led by Ahmed al-Sharaa.
“The realities so far is that the HTS and also the other armed groups have been sending good messages to the Syrian people,” United Nations special envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen told reporters in Geneva.
“They have been sending messages of unity, of inclusiveness,” he said, adding that “we have also seen… reassuring things on the ground.”
But “what we need not to see is of course that the good statements and what we are seeing on the ground at the beginning, that this is not followed up in practice in the days and the weeks ahead of us.”
Pedersen, a Norwegian diplomat who took over as UN envoy for Syria in 2018, said “the most important test will be how the transitional arrangements in Damascus is organized and implemented.”
“This arrangement, as I have emphasised many times, needs to be inclusive.”
His comments came after Assad fled Syria as the Islamist-led opposition alliance swept into the capital Damascus, bringing a spectacular end on Sunday to five decades of brutal rule by his clan.
Assad oversaw a crackdown on a democracy movement that erupted in 2011, sparking a war that killed 500,000 people and forced half the country to flee their homes, millions of them finding refuge abroad.
Just days after Assad’s fall, Pedersen warned that “we are still in what we call the very fluid period.”
“Things have not settled. There is a real opportunity for change, but this opportunity needs to be grasped by the Syrians themselves and supported by the UN and the international community.”
Syria, he said, was now “under the control of what I would call a patchwork of groups who are coordinating well for now, but they are not fully or formally united.”
“It’s important that we don’t see conflict between these groups.”
Pedersen also highlighted the need to de-escalate the conflict still raging in northeastern Syria, demanding in particular a halt to “Israeli attacks” inside the war-torn country.
The Syrian Observatory said Tuesday that Israel had conducted 300 strikes on Syria since Assad’s fall, adding that the raids had “destroyed the most important military sites” in the country.
“We are continuing to see Israeli movements and bombardments into Syrian territory,” Pedersen said.
“This needs to stop. This is extremely important.”
