Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa met with top German officials in a visit to Berlin to discuss Syria’s stability, refugees in Germany and German support for reconstruction.
Published On 30 Mar 202630 Mar 2026
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President Ahmed al-Sharaa is on his first trip to Germany since ousting Syria’s longtime leader Bashar al-Assad in late 2024.
Published On 30 Mar 202630 Mar 2026
Interim Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa has been received by German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier in Berlin before talks with Chancellor Friedrich Merz on rebuilding his country and the return of refugees.
“Our interest is in seeing Syria rebuilt as a stable and prosperous nation, including with the help of the many, many Syrians who came here to Germany and Europe during the civil war and found refuge here,” government spokesman Stefan Kornelius said before Monday’s talks.
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Speaking at a Federal Foreign Office forum in Berlin on Monday, al-Sharaa said: “We want to put this difficult time behind us and now catch up with the rest of the world.”
He pointed to investment opportunities in Syria’s energy, transport and tourism sectors, describing his homeland as diverse and with “a great wealth of people”.
“We stand with Syria,” German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said, pledging to support reconstruction efforts. “The Syrians deserve a chance, and we want to help ensure that this opportunity is well utilised.”
Al-Sharaa also suggested that he would like to see some of the Syrians who fled to Germany return to help with its reconstruction.
“These are Syrians who have studied at German universities, acquired German expertise and are now working in German companies,” he said. “Through investments in Syria, they can then bring this expertise back to Syria.”
Al-Sharaa was initially planning to visit Germany in January, but the trip was postponed as he sought to end fighting between Syrian government forces and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in the country’s north.
A demonstration against the plan to send refugees back to Syria has been registered in Berlin on Monday under the slogan “No deportation deals with human rights abusers”.
About one million Syrians fled their war-torn country for Germany in recent years, many of them arriving at the peak of the influx in 2015-2016 to escape the war.
The conservative Merz, who took power in May, has stepped up a drive to limit irregular immigration as he seeks to counter the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany party.
Merz said last year that with Syria’s war over, Syrians now have “no grounds for asylum in Germany”.
The government in December resumed deportations to Syria although only a handful of cases have gone ahead so far.
Merz also said he assumed many Syrians would return home voluntarily, drawing criticism from campaign groups who cited continued instability and rights abuses in Syria.
Millions of people have rung in the ancient Persian New Year, Nowruz, as war grips the Middle East. The 3,000-year-old Zoroastrian-rooted celebration marks the beginning of spring in the northern hemisphere and is celebrated by 300 million people in Iran and Central Asia.
Published On 21 Mar 202621 Mar 2026
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Trump calls NATO cowardly over lack of support for Iran war, says Strait of Hormuz should be protected ‘by other nations who use it’.
Published On 21 Mar 202621 Mar 2026
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Israeli air strikes target army camps in response to alleged attacks on the Druze community in Suwayda on Thursday.
Published On 20 Mar 202620 Mar 2026
Israel’s military has said it struck Syrian army camps overnight in response to what it claimed were attacks against the Druze community in the south of the country.
“This was in response to yesterday’s events, in which Druze civilians were attacked in the [Suwayda] area,” the Israeli military said in a post on Telegram on Friday.
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“The [Israeli military] will not allow harm to come to Druze in Syria and will continue to act for their protection.”
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor reported on Thursday that fighting broke out between government forces and fighters from local tribes against opposing Druze factions in the western countryside of Suwayda.
The fighting began after mortar shells fell on areas under the control of Druze factions.
The shelling later hit residential neighbourhoods in the city of Suwayda, sowing panic and fear among residents, the Syrian Observatory said.
Syria’s state-run SANA news agency did not acknowledge the fighting in Suwayda or the Israeli attack.
Violence first erupted in Suwayda on July 13 between Bedouin tribal fighters and Druze groups.
Government forces were sent in to quell the fighting, but the bloodshed worsened, and Israel carried out strikes on Syrian troops and also bombed the heart of the capital, Damascus, under the pretext of protecting the Druze.
Israel had already pushed deeper into Syrian territory following the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, occupying the buffer zone and saying the 1974 deal with Syria had collapsed.
The latest flare-up between the neighbouring countries comes as war roils the Middle East after the United States and Israel attacked Iran on February 28.
In a speech delivered after the Eid al-Fitr prayers on Friday in Damascus, Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa said he is working to keep Syria out of any conflict.
“It is important to remember that Syria has always been an arena of conflict and strife during the past 15 years and before that, but today it is in harmony with all neighbouring countries regionally and internationally,” he said.
He added that Syria stood “in full solidarity with the Arab states”.
“Covert action should not be confused with missionary work,” former United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger declared after the sudden abandonment of Iraqi Kurds to their fate against the Iraqi government in 1975.
Half a century later, this doctrine of geopolitical expediency echoes across the Middle East. As the US and Israel encourage Kurdish militias to serve as a ground force against Iran’s central government, knowing their aspiration for “regime change” needs a ground force, history offers a severe warning.
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From the mountains of Iraq in 1991 to the plains of Syria just weeks ago, Washington’s track record of using Kurdish fighters as disposable proxies suggests the current push for an Iranian Kurdish rebellion is fraught with risk.
Amid a rapidly escalating military confrontation that has seen US-Israeli air strikes assassinate top Iranian leaders, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Washington is seeking to open a new front.
Some US media reports claimed that thousands of Iranian Kurds have crossed from Iraq to launch a ground operation in northwestern Iran. That has not been verified. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has reportedly supplied these forces with light weapons as part of a covert programme to destabilise the country.
To facilitate this, US President Donald Trump reportedly held calls with Iraqi Kurdish leaders Masoud Barzani and Bafel Talabani as well as Iranian Kurdish leader Mustafa Hijri. While the White House and Kurdish officials in Erbil denied these reports, regional analysts remained wary.
The government of northern Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish region on Thursday denied involvement in any plans to arm Kurdish groups and send them into Iran.
Its president, Nechirvan Barzani, said it “must not become part of any conflict or military escalation that harms the lives and security of our fellow citizens”.
“Protecting the territorial integrity of the Kurdistan Region and our constitutional achievements can only be achieved through the unity, cohesion and shared national responsibility of all political forces and components in Kurdistan,” he added.
Mahmoud Allouch, a regional affairs expert, told Al Jazeera that the current strategy is aimed not simply at an immediate government overthrow but at “dismantling Iran” by inciting separatist movements as a prelude to its collapse. “The US and Israel want to produce a separatist armed Kurdish case in Iran similar to the Kurdish case that America imposed in Syria,” Allouch warned.
Added to this volatile mix is Turkiye and how it would react to any Kurdish uprising in the region. The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) began steps towards disarmament last summer, closing a chapter on a four-decade armed campaign against the Turkish state in a conflict that has killed more than 40,000 people. Any armed advances by Iranian Kurds could rankle Ankara.
For the Kurds, acting as the tip of the American spear has historically ended in disaster. In the 1970s, the US and Iran heavily armed Iraqi Kurdish rebels to bleed the government in Baghdad. Yet, once the shah of Iran secured a territorial concession from Iraq in 1975, he cut off the Kurds overnight with Washington’s approval. He himself was deposed in a revolution four years later.
This scenario repeated itself with devastating consequences in 1991. After then-US President George HW Bush encouraged Iraqis – both the Kurdish and Shia communities persecuted under Saddam Hussein – to rise up, the US military stood by as loyalist forces regrouped and used helicopter gunships to indiscriminately slaughter tens of thousands of civilians and rebels.
However, David Romano, a Middle East politics expert at Missouri State University, countered in a statement on his Facebook page that the aftermath of the 1991 catastrophe eventually forced the US to launch Operation Provide Comfort and a no-fly zone, which laid the groundwork for the semiautonomous Kurdish region in Iraq. “At important junctures, the Kurds have done exceedingly well as a result of cooperation with the US,” Romano wrote although he noted the opposite was true in 1975.
The dark irony of Washington asking Iranian Kurds to take up arms today is compounded by the recent collapse of Kurdish autonomy in neighbouring Syria. For years, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) served as the primary US proxy against ISIL (ISIS) and led the way to vanquishing the armed group in 2019 after years of fighting and suffering.
Yet in January, a little more than a year after the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad, the Trump administration backed Syria’s new central government in Damascus, essentially ending support for the SDF and Kurdish autonomy.
The US envoy to Syria, Thomas Barrack, declared that the original purpose of the SDF had largely expired. Within weeks, the SDF lost 80 percent of the territory it had bled for. For the Kurds across the region watching these events unfold, the implications were profound: The US is no longer perceived as a reliable partner or supporter of minorities.
Allouch highlighted this as a primary reason for Kurdish hesitation concerning Iran today, noting that Kurdish leaders are “bleeding from yesterday’s stab” in Syria.
The US and Israel are seeking “boots on the ground” to avoid deploying their own forces. But in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq, the leadership understands the severe blowback. Barzani recently emphasised to the Iranian foreign minister that the region “will not be a party to the conflicts”.
Analysts suggested that Barzani remains angered by the US dismissal of a 2017 independence referendum for the region. Romano noted that because Baghdad vociferously rejected attacking Iran, Erbil has a perfect justification to decline Washington’s requests after decades of being told by the US to remain integrated within Iraq.
The calculus is different for Iranian Kurds, known as Rojhelati. Betrayed by the Soviet Union in 1946, they have acutely suffered under successive Iranian governments and may view this as their “first and only opportunity” to change their status.
However, Allouch warned that without a solid US military commitment, which Trump has shown no desire to provide, this move could be “suicidal” against a fierce Iranian military response.
Pushing Iranian Kurds into an open conflict remains a highly volatile endeavour that has triggered an immediate reaction from Turkiye. Allouch told Al Jazeera that Ankara will coordinate with the Iranian government to crush any uprising.
“The US and the international powers realise that they cannot, in the end, impose a reality that contradicts the interests of the ‘Regional Quartet’ – Turkiye, Syria, Iran and Iraq,” Allouch said. He argued that this regional bloc applies far more pressure regarding the Kurdish issue than shifts in international policies.
Ultimately, the Kurds have consistently paid the price of changing geopolitics. As Washington seeks a cost-free rebellion with no ground deployment or losses of its own soldiers in Iran, the Kurds will weigh seductive American promises against the blood-soaked lessons of 1975, 1991 and 2026.
The killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in a United States-Israeli air campaign has sent shockwaves through the Middle East, decapitating the leadership of the “axis of resistance” at its most critical moment.
For decades, this network of groups allied with Iran was Tehran’s forward line of defence. But today, with its commander-in-chief dead and its logistical arteries cut, the alliance looks less like a unified war machine and more like a series of isolated islands.
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Hassan Ahmadian, a professor at the University of Tehran, warned that the era of strategic patience is over and the Iranian government is now prepared to “burn everything” in response to the attacks.
While Tehran promised to retaliate against the US and Israel “with a force they have never experienced before”, the reaction from its key proxies in Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq revealed a deep hesitation driven by local existential threats that may outweigh their ideological loyalty to a fallen leader.
In Beirut, the response from Hezbollah, long considered the crown jewel among Iran’s regional allies, has been cautiously calibrated.
After Sunday’s announcement of Khamenei’s death, the group issued a statement condemning the attack as the “height of criminality”. However, Al Jazeera correspondent in Beirut Mazen Ibrahim noted that the language used was defensive, not offensive.
“If one dismantles the linguistic structure of the statement, the complexity of Hezbollah’s position becomes clear,” Ibrahim said. “The secretary-general spoke of ‘confronting aggression’, which refers to a defensive posture. … He did not explicitly threaten to attack Israel or launch revenge operations.”
This caution is rooted in a new strategic reality. Since the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria in late 2024, the “land bridge” that supplied Hezbollah has been severed. Ali Akbar Dareini, a Tehran-based researcher, noted that this loss “cut the ground link with Lebanon”, leaving the group physically isolated.
Now with top leaders of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) killed alongside Khamenei, Hezbollah appears paralysed – caught between a battered domestic front in Lebanon and a vacuum of orders from Tehran.
In Yemen, the Houthis face an even more volatile calculus.
In his first televised address after the strikes on Iran began on Saturday, the group’s leader, Abdel-Malik al-Houthi, declared his forces “fully prepared for any developments”. Yet his rhetoric notably emphasised that “Iran is strong” and “its response will be decisive,” a phrasing that analysts interpreted as an attempt to deflect the immediate burden of war away from the Houthis.
The Houthis are under immense pressure. While they have successfully disrupted Red Sea shipping and fired missiles at Tel Aviv, they now face a renewed threat at home.
The internationally recognised Yemeni government, having won a power struggle against southern separatists, has sensed a shift in momentum. Defence Minister Taher al-Aqili recently declared: “The index of operations is heading towards the capital, Sanaa,” which the Houthis control. The statement signalled a potential ground offensive to retake Houthi territory.
This places the Houthis in a bind. While Houthi negotiator Mohammed Abdulsalam recently met with Iranian official Ali Larijani in Muscat, Oman, to discuss “unity of the arenas”, the reality on the ground is different. Engaging in a war for Iran could leave the Houthis’ home front exposed to government forces backed by regional rivals.
“Expanding the circle of targeting will only result in expanding the circle of confrontation,” the Houthi-affiliated Supreme Political Council warned in a statement that threatened escalation but also implicitly acknowledged the high cost of a wider war.
Perhaps nowhere is the dilemma more acute than in Iraq, where the lines between the state and the “resistance” are dangerously blurred.
Iran-aligned militias, many of which operate under the state-sanctioned Popular Mobilisation Forces, are now caught in a direct standoff with the US. Tensions have simmered since late 2024 when Ibrahim Al-Sumaidaie, an adviser to Iraq’s prime minister, revealed that Washington had threatened to dismantle these groups by force, a warning that led to his resignation under pressure from militia leaders.
Today, that threat looms larger than ever. Unlike Hezbollah or the Houthis, these groups are technically part of the Iraqi security apparatus. A retaliation from Iraqi soil would not just risk a militia war but also a direct conflict between the US and the Iraqi state.
With the IRGC commanders who once mediated these tensions now dead, the “restraining hand” is gone. Isolated militia leaders may now decide to strike US bases of their own accord, dragging Baghdad into a war the government has desperately tried to avoid.
Khamenei’s assassination has essentially shattered the command-and-control structure of the “axis of resistance”.
The network was built on three pillars: the ideological authority of the supreme leader, the logistical coordination of the IRGC and the geographic connection through Syria. Today, all three are broken.
“The most important damage to Iran’s security interests is the severing of the ground link,” Dareini said. With Khamenei gone, the “spiritual link” is also severed.
What remains is a fragmented landscape. In Lebanon, Hezbollah is too exhausted to open a northern front. In Yemen, the Houthis face a potential domestic offensive. In Iraq, militias risk collapsing the state they live in.
When the dust settles in Tehran, the region will face a dangerous unpredictability. The “axis of resistance” is no longer a coordinated army. It is a collection of angry, heavily armed militias, each calculating its own survival in a world where the orders from Tehran have suddenly stopped coming.