British Foreign Minister David Lemmy announced that the British government had "diplomatic contact" with the Syrian rebel group that overthrew President Bashar al-Assad, the BBC reported.
Lemmy said that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) remains a proscribed terrorist organization but that the UK "can have diplomatic contact and so we have diplomatic contact as would be expected".
"We want to see a representative government, an inclusive government. We want the stockpile of chemical weapons to be safe and not used, and we want to ensure that the violence does not continue... For all those reasons, using all available channels, and they are diplomatic, and of course intelligence channels, we seek to communicate with HTS where necessary," Lemmy said on December 15.
By the way, the British government has also announced the provision of a 50 million pound humanitarian aid package to vulnerable Syrians, including refugees in the region.
The BBC notes that the diplomatic contact with the HTS does not mean that the foreign minister was personally in contact with the rebel group. This also does not mean that the British government has removed HTS from the list of terrorist groups. For his part, the US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said earlier that Washington had "direct contact" with the HRT rebels who now control Syria.
