The UN Security Council on Thursday voted to lift sanctions on Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former al-Qaeda commander, and his interior minister, Anas Khattab.
Both Sharaa and Khattab were sanctioned by the UN for their association with al-Qaeda and ISIS. The US introduced the resolution to lift the sanctions and wanted it to happen before Sharaa visits the White House this Monday.
According to Al Monitor, the US resolution initially also called for sanctions to be lifted on Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), Sharaa’s group of jihadists, who took power in Damascus in December 2024. But China objected due to HTS’s ties with foreign fighters, particularly the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), a Uyghur group that seeks to establish an Islamic state in China’s western Xinjiang region.
Members of the TIP have been appointed to senior positions in the new Syrian military. China abstained from the vote, making it the only member of the 15-member Council that didn’t vote in favor of lifting the sanctions.
Fu Cong, China’s ambassador to the UN, said that Beijing “actively participated” in negotiations on the resolution and “legitimate concerns about counter-terrorism issues, in particular foreign terrorist fighters in Syria.” Fu said the US didn’t address all the members’ concerns and pushed for the vote “to serve its own political agenda.”
The US previously listed HTS as a terrorist organization but lifted the designation earlier this year as it has embraced the new Syrian leader despite his al-Qaeda past. Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammad al-Julani, was sanctioned by the UN in 2013, and his listing notes that, at the time, he was an associate of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al-Qaeda leader who was known for helping Osama bin Laden plot the 9/11 attacks, and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder of ISIS.
While Sharaa now presents himself as a moderate, there have been massacres of thousands of Alawite and Druze civilians committed by government forces or government-linked fighters since he took power.
