WASHINGTON, D.C. - US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Sunday that US President Donald Trump “personally” engaged with Syria’s interim president to halt fighting between Damascus-affiliated and Kurdish-led forces to facilitate the transfer of Islamic State (ISIS) detainees and allow negotiations on integration to continue.
Speaking at a joint press conference with Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico in Bratislava, Rubio said Trump engaged with Ahmed al-Sharaa on two occasions to enforce the ceasefire.
“When the fighting broke out, President Trump engaged personally, not once but twice, with al-Sharaa,” Rubio said. “He [Trump] said, ‘Stop the fighting so that we can move the [Islamic State] ISIS prisoners that are there… so that we have more time to work on this reintegration.’”
An internationally brokered ceasefire reached in late January halted hostilities between the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and Damascus-affiliated armed groups, outlining the gradual integration of northeast Syria’s (Rojava) civil and military institutions into Syrian state structures.
Meanwhile, the US military said Thursday it had completed the transfer of 5,700 ISIS male prisoners from Kurdish-held areas of Syria to Iraq during a 23-day mission.
Rubio also said the United States skipped “a Ukraine meeting” with four European countries during the Munich Security Conference on Friday because “we were meeting with Syria and the Kurds.”
His remarks followed a meeting on the sidelines of the conference that brought together Rubio, Syrian interim Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani, SDF chief Mazloum Abdi, and Ilham Ahmed, co-chair of foreign relations for the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES).
“They came together, the Kurdish leader was there,” Rubio said, calling it “a historic meeting.”
Secretary Rubio said “the challenge of Syria was going to be a very significant one,” acknowledging that “we are dealing with elements that, as we've said in the past, you know, we have concerns about things that they have done in the past.”
Sharaa, under his nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, led the now-dissolved Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which overthrew the Bashar al-Assad regime. HTS was a former al-Qaeda affiliate.
Rubio said the United States was faced with a choice: “to let the place fall apart into eighteen different pieces, long-term civil war, instability, mass migration, a playground for terrorists, ISIS running all over the place, Iran getting back in,” or “see if it was possible to work with these interim authorities and president al-Sharaa and with his team.”
Rubio said they chose to cooperate with Sharaa “because it made sense”, adding that the interim president has “kept his word up to this point; obviously, he has to keep doing that.”
“We like the trajectory,” Rubio said. “We have to keep it on that trajectory. We’ve got good agreements in place. The key now is implementation, and we’ll be very involved in that regard.”
Rubio said further agreements were still needed with Syria’s Druze, Bedouin, and Alawite communities. Clashes last year in Druze-majority Suwayda province killed hundreds, while violence in Alawite-majority coastal regions resulted in even higher civilian death tolls, with Damascus-affiliated forces blamed for many casualties.