Syria’s de facto leader says it could take up to four years to hold elections

BEIRUT – Syria’s de facto leader said on Sunday that it could take up to four years for elections to be held in Syria and that he plans to represent his Islamist group, which has led the country’s uprising, at an expected national dialogue summit for to dissolve the country.

Ahmad al-Sharaa, the head of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the group leading the new authority in Syria, made the comments in an interview with Saudi television channel Al-Arabiyya. It comes nearly a month after an HTS-led lightning uprising toppled President Bashar al-Assad’s decades-long rule, ending the country’s uprising that began in 2011.

Al-Sharaa said that holding elections will take time as Syria’s various forces need to hold a political dialogue and rewrite the country’s constitution after five decades of dictatorial rule by the Assad dynasty. In addition, the war-torn country’s damaged infrastructure must be rebuilt, he said.

“The opportunity we have today doesn’t come every five or 10 years,” said al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammed al-Golani. “We want the constitution to last as long as possible.”

Al-Sharaa is Syria’s de facto leader until March 1. Then Syria’s various factions will hold a political dialogue to determine the country’s political future and form an interim government to bring the divided country together. There, the HTS will disband after years of being the country’s most dominant rebel group, holding a strategic enclave in the country’s northwest, he said.

Earlier, an Israeli airstrike on the outskirts of Damascus on Sunday killed 11 people, according to a war monitor, as Israel continues to target Syrian weapons and military infrastructure even after the fall of Assad.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the airstrike targeted an arms depot belonging to Assad forces near the industrial city of Adra, northeast of the capital. According to the Observatory, at least eleven people, mostly civilians, were killed. The Israeli military did not comment on the airstrike on Sunday.

Israel, which has carried out hundreds of air strikes on Syria since the country’s uprising erupted into a civil war in 2011, rarely acknowledges this. It says its targets are Iranian-backed groups that have supported Assad.

In contrast to his criticism of key Assad ally Iran, al-Sharaa hoped to maintain “strategic relations” with Russia, whose air force played a crucial role during the conflict in keeping Assad in power for over a decade. Moscow has a strategic air base in Syria.

The HTS leader also said that negotiations were underway with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in northeastern Syria and he hoped their forces would integrate into the Syrian security authorities.

The Kurdish-led group is Washington’s main ally in Syria, where it is heavily involved in fighting sleeper cells of the extremist Islamic State group.

Turkish-backed Syrian rebels have also clashed with the SDF after the uprising and captured the key city of Manbij, as Ankara hopes to create a buffer zone near its border in northern Syria.

The rebels attacked near the strategic northern border town of Kobani, while the SDF shared video of a rocket attack that it said destroyed a radar system south of the city of Manbij.

In other developments:

– Syrian state media said a mass grave was found near the third-largest city of Homs. SANA said civil defense forces had been sent to the site in al-Kabo, one of many suspected mass graves where tens of thousands of Syrians are believed to have been buried during a brutal crackdown under Assad and his network of security agencies.

– An Egyptian activist wanted by Cairo for inciting violence and terrorism, Abdulrahman al-Qardawi, was arrested by Lebanese security forces after crossing the porous border from Syria, according to two judicial officials and a security official who spoke on condition of anonymity They were not authorized to speak to the press.

Al-Qardawi is an Egyptian activist living in Turkey and an outspoken critic of the Egyptian government. He had reportedly visited Syria to take part in the celebrations following Assad’s overthrow. His late father, Youssef al-Qaradawi, was a high-ranking and controversial Egyptian cleric who was revered by the banned Muslim Brotherhood. He had lived in exile in Qatar for decades.

– Lebanese security forces have arrested an armed group in the northern city of Tripoli that kidnapped a group of 26 Syrians who were recently smuggled into Lebanon, two Lebanese security officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak disseminate information to the media. The Syrians included five women and seven children, and security forces are working to repatriate them to Syria.