BERLIN: Israel’s foreign minister has urged Europe to “stop granting legitimacy” to Syria’s transitional authorities after hundreds of civilians were reportedly killed in clashes, in an interview published Sunday.
“Europe must not fail in reading the reality,” Foreign Minister Gideon Saar told Germany’s Bild newspaper.
“It must wake up. It must stop granting legitimacy to a regime whose first actions — unsurprising, given its well-known terrorist background — are these atrocities.”
Clashes erupted Thursday between Syria’s new security forces and loyalists of the former government along the Mediterranean coast in the heartland of the Alawite minority to which ousted president Bashar al-Assad belongs.
They escalated into reported mass killings, and the worst violence since Assad’s overthrow.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor has reported that 745 Alawite civilians were killed in Latakia and Tartus provinces.
The fighting has also killed 125 members of the security forces and 148 pro-Assad fighters, according to the Observatory, taking the overall death toll to 1,018.
Saar told Bild that “the international community in general, and Europe in particular, has flocked to Damascus in recent months to shake hands” with Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa.
“However (Sharaa) and his men were jihadists and remain jihadists, even if they now wear suits,” he argued.
Also read: Interim leader Sharaa calls for peace as Syria hit by deadliest violence in years
“This weekend, the masks came off, as (Sharaa’s) men mercilessly massacred their own people,” he added.
Sharaa’s Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which led the lightning offensive that toppled Assad in December, has its roots in the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda and remains proscribed as a terrorist organisation by many governments including the United States.
But Syria’s new leaders have been clamouring for the West to loosen sanctions imposed on Assad’s regime during the country’s civil war.
Last month the European Union eased sanctions on Syria’s energy, transport and banking sectors in a bid to help the country’s reconstruction.
Since Assad’s downfall, Israel has deployed troops to a UN-patrolled buffer zone that has separated Israeli and Syrian forces on the strategic Golan Heights since 1974.
Israeli forces have also carried out repeated air strikes against Syrian military sites in recent times.