Syrian president Sharaa expected to visit Washington, U.S. envoy says

MANAMA — U.S. Special Envoy to Syria Tom Barrack said Saturday that Syrian President Ahmed Sharaa was expected to visit Washington.

During the visit, Syria would “hopefully” join the U.S.-led coalition to defeat Islamic State, Barrack told reporters on the sidelines of the Manama Dialogue in Bahrain, an annual global security and geopolitical conference.

It would mark Sharaa’s second visit to the United States, following his address to the UN General Assembly in New York in September.

Since seizing power from Bashar al-Assad last December, Sharaa has made a series of foreign trips as his transitional government seeks to re-establish Syria’s ties with world powers that had shunned Damascus during Assad’s rule.

Syria is not a member of a U.S.-led coalition formed in 2014 to defeat the Islamic State militant group.

At its peak between 2014 and 2017, the Islamic State held sway over roughly a third of Syria and Iraq, where it imposed its extreme interpretation of Islamic sharia law and gained a reputation for shocking brutality.

The U.S.-led coalition and its local partners drove the extremists from their last stronghold in 2019. The group has been attempting to exploit the fall of the Assad regime to stage a comeback in Syria and neighbouring Iraq, sources told Reuters in June.