That didn’t take long at all… the Biden White House is already thinking about normalizing relations with al-Qaeda splinter faction Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, who still has a $10 million US bounty on his head for the fact that he fought with AQI and ISIS.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the US is receiving positive signs from the hardline Islamist group now in control of Damascus and major Syrian cities, to the point that the White House is thinking of dispatching officials to engage the new rulers.

“We’ve been in direct contact, and we’re also looking at getting people on the ground in Syria,” Blinken said Thursday in a Bloomberg television interview. “We need to see concrete action, not simply positive declarations.”

His reference to people on the ground presumably means dispatching top Middle East envoys such as Brett McGurk or Amos Hochstein, or other diplomats who have long worked on regional problems.

At this moment some Congressional leaders who previously led to the way in imposing severe sanctions on the Assad government are calling for those very sanctions to be removed now that Assad is out of power.

While Jolani has claimed that Syria’s ‘diversity’ and pluralist ethno-religious identity will be preserved and that he doesn’t intend to make Syria like Afghanistan, many Christians are in fear and unable to speak freely for fear of the hardline Islamists now in control.

Blinken has previously called for HTS to demonstrate that it will protect women and religious minorities, including Alawites, Christians, Shia and Druze. But so far signs on the ground are not at all positive in this direction…

Speaking in Damascus, Julani said that the regime’s morality police will operate under the Minister of Internal Affairs and be under the supervision of religious clerics and mullahs.

The morality police’s job will be to ensure that the public implements Sharia Law. pic.twitter.com/xdWQndTCRD

— Max Abrahms (@MaxAbrahms) December 19, 2024

Things are relatively quiet on the streets of Damascus, apart from jihadist groups occasionally intimidating Christian neighborhoods with black-flag waiving ‘patrols’ and convoys. But in the Hama and Latakia countryside areas there have been reports of targeted killings of Alawites and Christians.

During Blinken’s Bloomberg television interview that a potential Israel-Hamas ceasefire agreement is back on the table. He said that with Hezbollah and Iran now greatly weakened, chances have improved for peace in Gaza.

What do the Syrian ‘rebels’ think of America?…

The brother tried to warn the audience about colonial powers attempting to divert the revolution’s path, but he was forcibly stopped. pic.twitter.com/5V212NePK0

— Muslim Hind🏴🏳️ (@Al_HindMuslims) December 12, 2024

“We’ve all been fanning out, working with all of the different partners who can make a difference,” Blinken said. But for well over a year, the hoped-for hostage exchange deal and truce with Hamas has proved elusive.