Syrian President Sharaa meets Saudi Crown Prince on first foreign trip

CAIRO: Syria’s transitional President Ahmed al-Sharaa met Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh on Sunday in his first foreign trip as Syrian leader, Saudi state news agency SPA reported.

Live TV footage showed Sharaa shaking hands with the crown prince in the Saudi capital before sitting down for talks.

The Saudi crown prince is the second Gulf leader to meet Sharaa since the latter was declared president for a transitional phase last week.

Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani met Sharaa in Damascus on Thursday, becoming the first head of state to visit the Syrian capital since Bashar al-Assad was ousted in December.

Sharaa, an Islamist who was once an affiliate of al Qaeda, has been trying to gain support from Arab and Western leaders since Assad was toppled.

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Sharaa was accompanied on his visit by Syria’s foreign minister, Asaad Hassan al-Shibani.

Meanwhile, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said on Sunday he hoped President Donald Trump would end U.S. cooperation with the Syrian Kurdish YPG, as Turkey continued its military campaign against the group, killing 23 of its fighters.

The Turkish Defence Ministry said the 23 militants killed by Turkey’s armed forces in northern Syria belonged to the YPG militia and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK.

Turkey regards the PKK and YPG as identical, while the United States views them as separate groups, having banned the PKK as terrorists but recruited the YPG as its main ally in Syria in the campaign against Islamic State.

“We hope that Mr. Trump will make a decision that will put an end to this ongoing mistake in the region,” Fidan told a press conference in Doha with his Qatari counterpart.

He said the YPG was incapable of fighting Islamic State and only played a role in keeping the group’s prisoners in jail, adding that Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Jordan had held preliminary talks on fighting Islamic State.

Turkey has long called on Washington to withdraw support for the YPG, and Turkish forces and their allies in Syria have repeatedly fought with Kurdish militants there since the toppling of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad in December.

Turkey has said the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF – a U.S.-backed umbrella group that includes the Kurdish YPG – must disarm or face military intervention.

Under the administration of former U.S. President Joe Biden, the United States had 2,000 troops in Syria fighting alongside the SDF and YPG.