Fresh off a visit to Syria where he became one of the first US lawmakers to meet the country’s new Islamist president, a Republican lawmaker cautioned against Israeli efforts to divide the country, which is in its initial months of recovery since the collapse of the Assad regime.

Rep. Marlin Stutzman said in a Friday interview with The Times of Israel that Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa expressed “openness” to joining the Abraham Accords normalization agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors, but had several concerns that needed to be addressed beforehand.

“The first [concern] — which I felt was most important to him — was that Israel may have a plan to divide up the nation of Syria into… multiple parts. That was something that he was very opposed to,” Stutzman recalled.

The plan appeared to be a reference to the lobbying Israel has reportedly been doing in Washington for the US to buck Sharaa’s fledgling government in favor of establishing a decentralized series of autonomous ethnic regions, with the southern one bordering Israel being demilitarized.

The congressman said he understood the Syrian president’s opposition to this idea. “I would agree with Sharaa that keeping Syria unified would be important for the country to heal, grow and move forward.”

“Sharaa’s idea is to have more of a nationalist government under the Syrian banner, and that’s critical because Syria has such unique and diverse groups of people, whether it’s religiously or culturally or through their different sects that are in the country.

Israel has publicly declared its mistrust of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), Sharaa’s Islamist faction that led the campaign that toppled former president Bashar al-Assad and which emerged from a group that was affiliated with al-Qaeda until it cut ties in 2016.

Sharaa’s biggest foreign backer is Turkey, whose ties with Israel have plunged since the outbreak of the Gaza war,........

© The Times of Israel