Guterres Lands in Damascus, the First U.N. Secretary-General to Visit Syria in 17 Years

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres arrived in Damascus on Saturday for the first official visit to Syria by a United Nations chief since 2009, a trip that hands the country's new government its most visible international endorsement since it took power.

Interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa received Guterres at the presidential palace, where the two held talks before the U.N. chief met Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani and toured the old quarter of Damascus and the Umayyad Mosque. "The U.N. stands with Syria at this pivotal moment and I appeal to the international community to spare no effort to support the people of Syria as well," Guterres wrote on X shortly after landing.

The three-day visit is built around the transition rather than around aid alone. Guterres is scheduled to address Syria's new transitional parliament on Monday, meet representatives of civil society and non-governmental organizations working on women's issues, and inspect the U.N. Disengagement Observer Force, the peacekeeping mission that patrols the line with the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said the trip is meant to underline that Syria has a chance "not only to recover from conflict, but also to lay the foundations for a future for Syria that will be more stable, more inclusive, and more prosperous for all Syrians."

The optics are extraordinary by any measure. Al-Sharaa is a former al-Qaeda commander who spent years under U.N. sanctions and who led the offensive that toppled Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, closing out more than 13 years of civil war. Since then he has pursued an aggressive campaign of international rehabilitation, receiving French President Emmanuel Macron in Damascus earlier this month in the first visit by a Western head of state since Assad's fall.

What Syria needs from the visit is money and legal cover. Reconstruction estimates run into the hundreds of billions of dollars, much of the country's housing stock and power grid remains wrecked, and millions of refugees have yet to return. Sanctions imposed on the Assad government have only been partially unwound, and international lenders have moved slowly.

The security picture also remains unsettled. Israeli forces have struck targets inside Syria repeatedly since Assad's ouster and continue to hold positions beyond the Golan line, and sectarian violence has flared in coastal and southern provinces. Guterres is expected to press the transitional government on protections for minorities and on the timetable for elections before he leaves.

The last U.N. secretary-general to make the trip was Ban Ki-moon in 2009, two years before the uprising against Assad began. In the years that followed, the United Nations largely worked on Syria from Geneva and from across its borders, running cross-border aid convoys into rebel-held territory under Security Council authorizations that Russia repeatedly threatened to veto.

Guterres, whose second term as secretary-general ends in December 2026, has made the Syrian file a closing priority. Roughly 1.65 million refugees have gone home since Assad fell on Dec. 8, 2024, according to UNHCR, with the largest numbers returning from Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. About 4.7 million remain registered as refugees across the region, and the agency expects perhaps another million to return during 2026 — a pace that depends almost entirely on whether housing, electricity and jobs materialize in the towns they left.