LONDON: The UK will decide “quickly” whether to remove the Islamist group HTS, which spearheaded the offensive to oust Syrian president Bashar Assad, from its list of terrorist organizations, a senior minister said on Monday.
Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) is rooted in Syria’s Al-Qaeda branch, but broke ties with the group in 2016. The UK and United States still classify it as a terror group.
Pat McFadden, whose ministerial role includes responsibility for UK national security, on Monday said that the government was considering removing the group from the blacklist.
“If the situation stabilizes, there’ll be a decision to make about how to deal with whatever new regime is in place there,” he told BBC Radio 4.
“I think it should be a relatively swift decision so it’s something that will have to be considered quite quickly, given the speed of the situation on the ground.”
McFadden added that Syrian opposition forces leader Abu Mohammad Al-Jolani was “saying some of the right things about the protection of minorities, about respecting people’s rights. So we’ll look at that in the days to come.”
He added to Sky News that “it will partly depend on... how that group behaves now.”
The ousted president’s wife, Asma Assad, was born and raised in the UK, but McFadden said nobody had yet contacted the government on her behalf.
“We’ve certainly had no contact or no request for Mr.Assad’s wife to come to the UK,” he told the BBC.
Asma Assad and other individuals and entities linked to her husband have been sanctioned by the US since 2020, with then-secretary of state Mike Pompeo calling her “one of Syria’s most notorious war profiteers.”
Bashar Assad, in power since 2000, was overthrown on Sunday following a swift campaign by HTS and its allies.
The government fell more than 13 years after Assad’s crackdown on anti-government protests ignited Syria’s civil war, which has drawn in foreign powers, jihadists and claimed more than half a million lives.
Bashar Assad and his family are in Moscow, according to Russian news agencies.