The meeting comes as the new administration seeks to reassure minorities of their security in Assad's Syria.
The de facto leader of Syria Ahmed al-Sharaa met with senior Christian leaders on Tuesday, calling on the head of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) to guarantee minority rights after seizing power earlier this month.
“The head of the new Syrian government, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is meeting with representatives from the Christian community in Damascus,” the Syrian General Command said in a statement on Telegram.
The statement included pictures of the meeting with Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican religious leaders.
On Tuesday, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot called for a political change in Syria that guarantees the independence of the different regions of the country.
He said that he hoped that “Aram can rule again your future“.
But for this to happen, the country needs “a political change in Syria that includes all the different areas, that protects basic rights and freedoms,” said Barrot during a visit to Lebanon with Defense Minister Sebastien Lecornu.
Barrot and Lecornu also met with Lebanese army chief Joseph Aoun and visited United Nations peacekeepers on the southern border, where a fragile covenant The end of November ended the fierce fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.
'Good' talks with the SDF
Since seizing power, the new Syrian leadership, led by al-Sharaa, a former member of al-Qaeda, has repeatedly tried to reassure the minority that they will not be harmed, although some isolated incidents have sparked protests.
On December 25, thousands of people protested in several areas of Syria after a video showed an attack on an Alawite shrine in the north of the country.
A day earlier, hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets in Christian areas of Damascus to protest the burning of a Christmas tree near Hama in central Syria.
Before the civil war began in 2011, there were about one million Christians in Syria, according to researcher Fabrice Balanche, who estimates that their number has dropped to about 300,000.
Earlier, a Syrian official told AFP that al-Sharaa held “good” talks with representatives of the Kurdish militia led by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) on Monday.
The talks were al-Sharaa's first with SDF officials since his rebels overthrew former dictator Bashar al-Assad in early December and came as the SDF is locked in a battle with Turkish forces in northern Syria.
The United States-backed SDF led a military campaign that pushed ISIL (ISIS) fighters from their last stronghold in Syria in 2019.
But Turkiye, who has been associated for a long time with the al-Sharaa group of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, says that the SDF is led by members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has been rebelling against Turkey for ten years. and is called a “terrorist” group in Turkey and the US.
On Sunday, al-Sharaa told Al Arabiya television that the SDF should be integrated into the new national army.
“Weapons should be in the hands of the government only. Anyone who is armed and qualified to enter the Ministry of Defense will be welcomed,” he said.