The UK can engage with Syria’s new rulers despite the group being banned for terrorist links, No10 said today.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) seized power over the weekend as the Assad regime dramatically collapsed.
The shift has sparked questions as HTS is proscribed in Britain due to its past association with al Qaida.
However, the group’s leader, Abu Mohammed al-Golani, has sought to present his group as more moderate and inclusive.
Ministers struck different tones yesterday, with Pat McFadden suggesting a ‘swift’ decision could be taken to drop the ban, before Keir Starmer played down the prospect of an immediate change.
The PM’s official spokesman said: ‘The fact that HTS is a proscribed terrorist group does not prevent the Government from engaging with HTS in the future.’
Pointing to terrorism legislation, he added: ‘There’s no absolute offence of meeting a proscribed organisation’
He said that engagement with such organisations ‘could for example include meetings designed to encourage a designated group to engage in a peace process or facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid’.
The spokesman added: ‘More broadly we keep proscriptions under review and we’re obviously monitoring the situation closely.’
Sir Keir told reporters while on a visit to the Middle East yesterday that there was ‘no decision pending at all’ on the matter, and described it as ‘far too early’.
It came after Mr McFadden said that any decision on the group needed to be taken quickly.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday: ‘They’ve been proscribed for quite a long time now.
‘The leader of that group has distanced himself away from some of the things that have been said in the past. He is saying some of the right things about the protection of minorities, about respecting people’s rights. So we’ll look at that in the days to come.’
He added: ‘We don’t know what will happen in Syria right now, whether it’s going to be a better future for the country, or whether it’s going to be more chaos, no one can be certain about that right now.
‘But obviously, if the situation stabilises, there’ll be a decision to make about how to deal with whatever new regime is in place there.’
He added: ‘I think it should be a relatively swift decision so it’s something that will have to be considered quite quickly, given the speed of the situation on the ground.’