A source in the Syrian presidency denied today, Tuesday, the authenticity of the information reported by the former American ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, in which he talked about meetings in March 2023 with President Ahmed Al -Shara in Idlib “to rehabilitate him politically.”
The source told Al -Jazeera that the meetings referred to by Ford were part of a series of meetings with hundreds of visiting delegations, devoted to display and explaining the Idlib experience.
The Syrian presidency also indicated that Ambassador Robert Ford was part of a delegation of a British organization for studies and research, and that the sessions were limited to general questions related to the Idlib experience, and did not include what was mentioned in Ford’s statements.
Ford had said, during a session before the Council of International Relations in Baltimore “in early May, that a British organization specialized in resolving conflicts invited it to participate in an initiative aimed at removing Sharia from the world of terrorism and introducing it into politics, he said.
He stated that he met the Sharia 3 times, twice during the year 2023, and a third after he took power in Damascus last January, after the kidnapping attack by the Syrian opposition factions, and resulted in the fall of the Bashar al -Assad regime in December 2024.
Ford said that he held a “civilized conversation” in his first meeting with the Sharia in 2023 in Idlib, and regained the details of the meeting, saying, “I sat next to him with his long beard and military clothes, and I told him in Arabic,” I did not imagine that I would sit next to you. “He replied calmly,” nor me. “
The former ambassador indicated that the Sharia did not apologize for the attacks attributed to him in Iraq and Syria, but he realistically spoke about the need to shift and make concessions.
Ford held the position of US ambassador to Syria between 2011 and 2014, in one of the most tense periods in the history of relations between the two countries, as his period of work coincided with the outbreak of the Syrian revolution.
He was the first Western diplomat to visit Syrian cities such as Hama in the beginning of the revolution, in a move that sparked the anger of the Syrian regime at the time, and Washington later prompted it to withdraw it for security reasons, and after its retirement from the diplomatic corps, Ford remained one of the most active voices in the Syrian file in the American circles, and is currently working as a researcher in a number of centers of thought and policies.
