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Senior U.S. officials have arrived in Damascus on the first U.S. diplomatic mission to Syria in over a decade. The officials are expected to meet with members of HTS, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the armed Islamist group that helped overthrow Bashar al-Assad’s regime earlier this month. The meeting is occurring even though HTS remains on the State Department’s terrorist list.
This comes as questions remain over the fate of Kurdish populations in Syria. A commander of the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish forces said it would agree to withdraw any non-Syrian Kurdish fighters from northern Syria if Turkey agrees to a complete ceasefire:
Mazloum Abdi: “We said that we are ready to withdraw our forces from the border and for the area to be free of our forces and for the internal security forces to be present instead of our forces, in addition to the presence of American forces in the area to supervise this area, on the condition that there is a complete truce.”
The Wall Street Journal reports an official in the Syrian Kurds’ civilian administration has directly appealed to Donald Trump to pressure Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan against sending troops into Syria.
Meanwhile, press freedom groups have condemned the killing of two Kurdish women journalists — Jihan Belki and Nazim Dashdam — by a Turkish drone as they were reporting on attacks on the Tishrin Dam on the outskirts of Kobani.
