Syria’s new President Ahmad al-Sharaa will mark his United Nations debut with a Sept. 24 address to the General Assembly, pleading for patience and support as he steers his war-ravaged country through steep domestic unrest and regional security challenges.
His participation will be remarkable many times over: the first time a Syrian head of state or government attends the GA, Syrian diplomats told PassBlue; and amid sensitive geopolitical wrangling to resolve his former jihadist group’s UN terrorist designation. That move would ordinarily require a decision from the Security Council, but some members were set to drag their feet to extract concessions from other countries backing Syria’s new authorities, according to a Turkish official. The United States State Department pre-empted those complications by issuing a travel waiver for the Syrian delegation in late August, The AP reported.
The Syrians will also debut a new ambassador to the UN, Ibrahim Olabi, a human rights expert who was educated in the West.
Al-Sharaa’s chief priority in his participation at the high-level week of the UN General Assembly’s 80th session will be improving ties with the US and greater buy-in from other world powers to advance his country’s reconstruction efforts. President Trump’s move to lift sanctions on Syria was an early triumph. But al-Sharaa seeks to convince the US and the international community to lift remaining sanctions, financially invest in Syria and support the country’s stabilization.
“It’s really significant that the new government in Damascus gets to have a seat at the UN General Assembly,” said Soner Cagaptay, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “That means the new government has somehow magically gained the backing of all P5 members of the UN Security Council.”
Russia, a staunch backer of the Bashar al-Assad regime, has invited al-Sharaa, 42, to Moscow in October for a Russia-Arab Summit. Al-Sharaa and his former jihadist group forced al-Assad to flee to Moscow last December in a stunning 10-day offensive that upended regional dynamics.
The diplomatic maneuvers by al-Sharaa to win over the international community since then attest to his political skills, but his country’s path to recovery has been marred by eruptions of sectarian violence. The integration of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces into the Syrian military has not stopped deadly clashes between Syrian Kurds and the new government.
A UN commission in August found that Syrian forces killed about 1,400 people, mostly civilians, in predominantly Alawite areas in March. Government troops were also involved in a massacre in a Druze-dominated province, and Israel continues to attack Syria, invoking the Druze community’s vulnerability.
Al-Sharaa’s rule has so far been too focused on the diplomatic stage at the expense of internal reforms, some Syrian civil society activists charge. Nour Hallak, a former humanitarian aid coordinator who has moved back to Idlib, to manage his family’s business, said the government is struggling to run damaged state bodies.
“When I go to an institution, and I ask about something, they don’t have answers,” he said.
Syria’s new ambassador to the UN, Ibrahim Olabi, seeks to square these concerns, dispelling the shadow of sectarian violence that hangs over the new Syria, while signaling to Syrians at home that their concerns are visible on the new government’s radar. A prominent figure in the Assad-era diaspora scene, Olabi, a human rights lawyer, was appointed in August. (He declined to be interviewed for this article.)
Born in 1993 to parents who fled the Assad regime, Olabi grew up in Saudi Arabia and Britain. He trained in law at the University of Manchester and in public policy at Oxford. Colleagues say he is pragmatic and deeply committed to Syria’s evolution.
Soha Alakraa, Olabi’s colleague from the Syrian British Consortium, an advocacy group, where he still serves as a board member, said she believes diaspora figures like the new ambassador are well poised to support Syrians exploring their political horizons and engage with the government.
When Olabi arrived in Damascus after Assad’s fall, he described it as a “day I thought would never come,” sharing a photo of himself in the city on social media. Two months later, he was appointed special adviser to the Syrian Foreign Ministry on legal matters.
In the decades leading to Assad’s ouster, Olabi was central to various legal efforts to hold the regime accountable for human rights violations and provide protections to factions involved in the civil war. While in law school, he drafted guidance on the law of armed conflict for Syrian rebels, and in 2014 he co-founded the British-based and largely German-funded Syrian Legal Development Program, which linked Syrian nongovernmental organizations with relevant policymakers.
Jean d’Aspremont, Olabi’s professor at the University of Manchester, told PassBlue that Olabi was “calm, reflective, and solutions-oriented” with the “character required for high-stakes multilateral diplomacy.”
Olabi insisted to the Middle East Eye in December, after Assad’s fall, that the new Syrian government would be vigilant toward rights abuses. But he faces a colossal challenge persuading nervous Syrians that the sectarian clashes of recent months were an anomaly and that inclusive governance, specifically security and justice center reforms, are on their way.
The new Syrian authorities’ chief task, said Kristyan Benedict from Amnesty International UK, who has known Olabi through his activism since 2011, will be to build trust between Syrians and their new rulers.
“I know Ibrahim [Olabi] is aware of this and understands the key principles of security sector reform and justice reform,” he said. “I hope he will insist on having his voice heard over those who do not prioritize every Syrian’s right to truth and justice.”
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Mohamad Rimawi is a freelance journalist based in New York City whose work has been published inThe Nation. He is currently a graduate student at New York University, pursuing an M.A. in Global Journalism and Near Eastern Studies with a Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship.
Beril Eski is a law-trained and multiple award-winning journalist from Istanbul. She has contributed regularly to The Washington Post and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian and Politico, among others. She is currently a Goren Fellow at New York University, pursuing degrees in Global Journalism and Near Eastern Studies.
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Beril if the President of Syria is coming to the UN to plead for patience with his country which is occupied and bombarded regularly by Israel and he is not asking the international community to stop Israel’s occupation and bombing of his country, then he has to stay in Damascus because he is not achieving any real objective for the people of Syria during this costly trip to New York!