Jerusalem needs to withdraw its forces in Syria to the positions they held before the Assad regime fell on Dec. 8, 2024, for a security agreement with Damascus to cross the finish line, Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa said during his historic visit to Washington this week.
“We are engaged in direct negotiations with Israel, and we have gone a good distance on the way to reach an agreement. But to reach a final agreement, Israel should withdraw to their pre-Dec. 8 borders,” the former U.S.-listed foreign terrorist told The Washington Post in a Monday interview published on Tuesday.
U.S. President Donald Trump hosted al-Sharaa at the White House on Monday for the first visit by a Syrian president to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The Syrian leader asserted that Trump agrees with his position on Israel’s withdrawal of forces.
“The United States is with us in these negotiations, and so many international parties support our perspective in this regard. Today, we found that Mr. Trump supports our perspective as well, and he will push as quickly as possible in order to reach a solution for this,” said al-Sharaa.
After the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, Jerusalem seized control of large parts of southern Syria, expanding a security zone and maintaining a military presence amid ongoing clashes and airstrikes.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sept. 22 dismissed reports that his government was willing to give up the country’s buffer zone in Syria as part of a potential security deal with the new regime in Damascus.
Talks with Syria are focused on “a security arrangement in which they demilitarize southwest Syria, and we ensure the security of our Druze allies in Jabal al-Druze,” the Israeli leader stated in a recording on X.
Al-Sharaa appeared to dismiss the prospects of demilitarizing the region south of Damascus as part of a renewed security pact with Jerusalem based on the 1974 Disengagement of Forces Agreement that ended the Yom Kippur War.
“To talk about an entire region demilitarized, it will be difficult, because if there is any kind of chaos, who will protect it? If this demilitarized zone was used by some parties as a launching pad for hitting Israel, who is going to be responsible for that?” he said. “And at the end of the day, this is Syrian territory, and Syria should have the freedom of dealing with their own territory,” he added.
“Israel occupied the Golan Heights in order to protect Israel, and now they are imposing conditions in the south of Syria in order to protect the Golan Heights. So after a few years, maybe they will occupy the center of Syria in order to protect the south of Syria. They will reach Munich on that pathway,” said the Syrian leader.
Jerusalem has repeatedly stated its legitimate security concerns regarding Syria as the reason for the Israeli military taking up positions in the south of the country, contradicting the claim made by al-Shaara, expressed in the Post interview, that the “advances that Israel made into Syria are not coming from [their] security concerns but are coming from their expansionist ambitions.”
“Israel has always claimed that it has concerns about Syria because it is afraid of the threats that the Iranian militias and [Lebanon’s] Hezbollah represent. We are the ones who expelled those forces out of Syria,” he said.
