US President Donald Trump has said that he is “very satisfied” with Syria’s new government.
A coalition led by jihadist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a regional offshoot of Al-Qaeda, captured Damascus and displaced former President Bashar Assad late last year.
“The United States is very satisfied with the results displayed” since the takeover, Trump said on Truth Social on Monday.
Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, who once led HTS, is “working diligently to make sure good things happen, and that both Syria and Israel will have a long and prosperous relationship,” he said.
It is important that West Jerusalem not “interfere with Syria’s evolution into a prosperous State,” Trump added.
Just days earlier, Israeli media reported that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) sustained casualties after a clash with gunmen in the south of Syria, where West Jerusalem annexed a strip of land near the occupied Golan Heights last year.
The area was also recently the target of joint US-Syrian operations.
US forces and the Syrian Interior Ministry destroyed more than 15 caches of weapons and drugs belonging to Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) in the south of the country over the last week, CENTCOM reported on Sunday.
Al-Sharaa promised his support against IS during his visit to Washington earlier this month.
The new Syrian government has struggled to rein in sectarian violence since taking over; thousands of people from the Druze, Alawite, and Christian communities have reportedly been killed in sporadic outbursts