Talks with Israel on a security framework had reached agreement on about 90 percent of the issues, Syria’s president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, has said. But Israel later pulled out of the talks or added new conditions, he claimed.
Speaking at an Atlantic Council discussion in New York on Tuesday, the Syrian president said there had been several rounds of talks with Israel and that at one point the two sides agreed on about 90 percent of the issues. But Israel walked away from that understanding “for various reasons”.
Al-Sharaa said Israel has carried out attacks and aggression in Syria ever since the fall of the former Syrian government. He claimed Israel is occupying new areas of Syrian territory and continuing raids, arrests and bombing inside the country.
Despite all this, he said, Syria is still trying to resolve the problems through diplomacy and wants to proceed through negotiation. But peace cannot be discussed until the security and rights of Syrians are assured.
Al-Sharaa said direct talks with Israel began about a year ago. From the outset Damascus demanded that before any talks on security arrangements, Israel return to the positions set after the 1974 agreement. If those security arrangements succeed, he said, long-term peace can be discussed.
Al-Sharaa also set out Syria’s position on the Golan Heights. The Golan is Syrian territory as recognised by the United Nations, he said, so there is no room to discuss whose land it is.
The Syrian president also proposed forming an international committee to examine Israel’s security concerns. In his view such a committee could assess which of the concerns Israel raises are merely perceptions and which are genuine security concerns.
Asked about the Trump administration’s recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, al-Sharaa recounted a joke he made with President Donald Trump. During their meeting at the White House, he said, he asked: “Why don’t you give New Jersey to the Israelis? You don’t own the Golan Heights to give it to them, but New Jersey is yours.”
Al-Sharaa met Trump at the White House last November, which the report described as the first White House visit by a Syrian head of state since Syria’s independence in 1946. He had met Trump earlier in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, in May 2025.
Al-Sharaa also spoke about the foreign military presence in Syria. He said the number of Russian military bases in the country has fallen from about 170 to two, which he said are now used as training centres for the Syrian army. The status of Turkey’s military bases in north-west Syria is also moving towards a “legal framework”, he said.
Asked by Brett McGurk, the former Middle East coordinator for President Joe Biden, about the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, al-Sharaa said he had no involvement in them. He said he was only 13 at the time.
He expressed sorrow for those killed in the United States in the 9/11 attacks, while also mentioning those harmed by United States policy in the Middle East at the time. Al-Sharaa said he had no involvement whatsoever in the events of that period.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report