Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa is set to visit the White House on November 10 to meet with US President Donald Trump, The Jerusalem Post learned on Saturday. The event would be the first time in history that a Syrian president visited the White House.
In recent weeks, contacts were held through United States Special Envoy to Syria Tom Barrack to formally bring Syria into the coalition against ISIS, and now the Syrian president is expected to join the initiative.
Barrack said earlier on Saturday that Sharaa was expected to visit Washington.
During the visit, Syria would "hopefully" join the US-led coalition to defeat Islamic State, Barrack told reporters on the sidelines of the Manama Dialogue in Bahrain, an annual global security and geopolitical conference.
It would mark Sharaa's second visit to the United States, following his address to the UN General Assembly in New York in September.
Sharaa traveling to reestablish Syrian ties
Since seizing power from Bashar al-Assad last December, Sharaa has made a series of foreign trips as his transitional government seeks to re-establish Syria's ties with world powers that had shunned Damascus during Assad's rule.
Syria is not a member of a US-led coalition formed in 2014 to defeat the Islamic State terrorist group.
"We are trying to get everybody to be a partner in this alliance, which is huge for them," Barrack said.
Sharaa once led Syria's offshoot of al-Qaeda, but a decade ago his anti-Assad rebel group broke away from the network founded by Osama bin Laden, and later clashed with Islamic State.
At its peak between 2014 and 2017, the Islamic State held sway over roughly a third of Syria and Iraq, where it imposed its extreme interpretation of Islamic sharia law and gained a reputation for shocking brutality.
The US-led coalition and its local partners drove the extremists from their last stronghold in 2019. The group has been attempting to exploit the fall of the Assad regime to stage a comeback in Syria and neighboring Iraq, sources told Reuters in June.
Syria-Israel de-escalation talks
Barrack earlier told the summit that Syria and Israel continued to hold de-escalation talks, which the US has been mediating. He told reporters that Syria and Israel were close to reaching an agreement but declined to say when exactly a deal could be reached.
Syria and Israel are in talks to reach an agreement that Damascus hopes will secure a halt to Israeli airstrikes and the withdrawal of Israeli troops who have pushed into southern Syria.
The Syrian source said the US is pushing for a security agreement to be agreed with Israel by the time Sharaa visits Washington.
Israel and Syria have been Middle East adversaries for decades. Despite the overthrow of Assad last December, territorial disputes and deep-seated political mistrust between the two countries remain.