In an interview with Saudi Arabia’s Al Arabiya, Syria’s new de-facto leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, said he had expected a more positive engagement from Iran following the fall of the decades-long Assad government.
"We were expecting positive statements from Tehran”, the leader of Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham said as Tehran remains tight-lipped on what happens next. Syria had been a key route to arm its ally Hezbollah in Lebanon, and was strategically critical militarily with bases and military personnel stationed across Syria.
While he expressed hope that Tehran would scale back its military intervention in the region, he said that "a broad segment [of the country] aspires to a positive Iranian role in the region,” the Syrian population having seen both Iran and Russia heavily involved in Syrian affairs since the 2011 civil war.
Referring to the killing of an Iranian embassy worker and the storming of the Iranian embassy on December 8, when rebels took control of Damascus and President Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow, he told Al Arabiya that the group’s military “did its duty towards the Iranian headquarters despite the injuries”.
It sparked a diplomatic fiasco in Tehran. Foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said last week that Davood Bitaraf was killed by “terrorists”, shot in his vehicle in Damascus, saying that the Syrian transitional government is responsible for "identifying, prosecuting, and punishing the perpetrators of this crime.”
In a statement to the media, he said: ”The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is seriously pursuing the matter through appropriate channels and various diplomatic and international avenues.”
The new leader, a former member of Al Qaeda, has made no secret of his pleasure at reducing the influence of Iran in Syria, saying that since the fall of Assad, Syria's opposition had “set the Iranian project in the region back by 40 years”.
“By removing Iranian militias and closing Syria to Iranian influence, we’ve served the region’s interests—achieving what diplomacy and external pressure could not, with minimal losses,” he said, referring to Iran’s military allies which span the Middle East.
