DAMASCUS: UN nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi said he visited Damascus on Tuesday to restart talks focused on fostering confidence in the peaceful use of atomic energy by Syria.
Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, met with President Bashar Assad, who had extended the invitation, and Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad.
“We’re ready to start working on reigniting high-level dialogue between the IAEA and Syria, focusing on building confidence in the peaceful use of nuclear energy in Syria,” Grossi wrote in a post on X.
Syria’s state news agency also reported Grossi’s visit.
IAEA inspectors last visited Syria in 2011, the year its civil war began after the government’s violent crackdown on street protests against Assad’s rule.
They were seeking to revive a stalled IAEA investigation into activity at a site in Syria’s eastern desert that US intelligence had deemed to be a nascent, North Korean-designed reactor intended to produce plutonium for atomic weaponry, before Israel bombed it to rubble in 2007.
The Vienna-based IAEA also sought information about other sites that may have been linked to the Deir Ezzor facility.
Syrian authorities have said it was a non-nuclear military site, but the IAEA concluded in 2011 that it was “very likely” to have been a reactor that should have been declared to nuclear non-proliferation inspectors.
UN nuclear watchdog chief visits Syria to restart talks
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UN nuclear watchdog chief visits Syria to restart talks
- IAEA inspectors last visited Syria in 2011, the year its civil war began after the government’s violent crackdown on street protests against Assad’s rule
Syria Kurds chief says ‘all efforts’ being made to salvage deal with Damascus
- Abdi said the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the Kurds’ de facto army, remained committed to the deal
- The two sides were working toward “mutual understanding” on military integration and counter-terrorism
DAMASCUS: Syrian Kurdish leader Mazloum Abdi said Thursday that “all efforts” were being made to prevent the collapse of talks on an agreement with Damascus to integrate his forces into the central government.
The remarks came days after Aleppo saw deadly clashes between the two sides before their respective leaders ordered a ceasefire.
In March, Abdi signed a deal with Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa to merge the Kurds’ semi-autonomous administration into the government by year’s end, but differences have held up its implementation.
Abdi said the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the Kurds’ de facto army, remained committed to the deal, adding in a statement that the two sides were working toward “mutual understanding” on military integration and counter-terrorism, and pledging further meetings with Damascus.
Downplaying the year-end deadline, he said the deal “did not specify a time limit for its ending or for the return to military solutions.”
He added that “all efforts are being made to prevent the collapse of this process” and that he considered failure unlikely.
Abdi also repeated the SDF’s demand for decentralization, which has been rejected by Syria’s Islamist authorities, who took power after ousting longtime ruler Bashar Assad last year.
Turkiye, an important ally of Syria’s new leaders, sees the presence of Kurdish forces on its border as a security threat.
In Damascus this week, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan stressed the importance of the Kurds’ integration, having warned the week before that patience with the SDF “is running out.”
The SDF control large swathes of the country’s oil-rich north and northeast, and with the support of a US-led international coalition, were integral to the territorial defeat of the Daesh group in Syria in 2019.
Syria last month joined the anti-IS coalition and has announced operations against the jihadist group in recent days.
