As Syria’s new leaders take on the task of governing the country, world powers sent emissaries into the region on Thursday to begin trying to shape Syria’s future and their relations with the rebels who toppled Bashar al-Assad from the presidency.
The U.S. secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, met in Jordan with King Abdullah II and called it “a time of promise but also peril for Syria and its neighbors” before flying to Turkey to meet with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Mr. Blinken said it was essential for Syria’s new government, led by a Sunni Islamist group that the United States and others have called a terrorist organization, to respect basic principles of human rights, including the protection of minorities, and to ensure that Syria “is not used as a base for terrorism by groups like the Islamic State.”
He and Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, also delivered a message to Israel on Thursday, saying that its military presence in Syria, where it has taken control of a buffer zone along the Syrian-Israeli border, must be temporary. After the Assad government fell last weekend, Israel moved troops into the area and has carried out hundreds of airstrikes against the regime’s military assets, saying it worried that extremists could exploit the power vacuum and seize abandoned weapons to attack Israeli territory.
“Israel is concerned that that vacuum could be filled by terrorists, by extremists, and so it moved forces into the buffer zone,” Mr. Blinken told reporters in Jordan. “It has told us and told others that that’s a temporary move, just to ensure, again, that this vacuum isn’t filled by something bad.”
