On 6 November 2025 the UN Security Council voted to take Ahmad al-Sharaa off the sanctions list it maintains for ISIL and Al-Qaida, lifting a travel ban, an asset freeze and an arms embargo. The vote was 14 in favor, none against, China abstaining.
Eight months later, on Saturday, the UN's secretary-general walked into his palace in Damascus.
António Guterres came for three days, the first visit by a sitting secretary-general since Ban Ki-moon in 2009. Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani received him and the UN delegation at the airport. He met al-Sharaa at the People's Palace, then visited the Umayyad Mosque and toured the Old Quarter with Syria's permanent representative to the UN, Ibrahim Olabi.
"I have just arrived in Damascus for a visit of solidarity," Guterres said on arrival. His message, he said, was that the UN stands with Syria and that the international community should spare no effort in supporting Syrians.
Al-Shaibani, who sat in on the talks, said afterward that they went to increasing UN support for reconstruction and to a government plan to close Syria's displacement camps, Reuters reported. He asked for more help from the international community, and named the European Union in particular.
Guterres put the case for outside help plainly. "No country emerges from a very severe conflict and rebuilds itself on its own," he said. "We must help Syria in its determination and resolve to do so."
That is the practical business. The sharper exchange was about the south.
"What is happening in the region around the Golan Heights is totally unacceptable," Guterres said. Al-Shaibani called for an immediate and unconditional Israeli withdrawal from the areas Israeli forces have pushed into. He went further in his own remarks, saying lasting peace cannot be reached amid what he called grave violations of Syrian sovereignty, and that continued Israeli military operations and the illegal occupation of Syrian territory beyond the 1974 line are a direct threat to the region's security and a drain on the country's resources.
Those are Syria's words for it. The UN's own commitment is narrower and older. Before the trip, the secretary-general's spokesman said Guterres would reaffirm support for the Syrian government and people while stressing the country's sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity.
Guterres is due to visit UNDOF, the peacekeeping force that has sat on the edge of the occupied Syrian Golan since 1974. The National reported that a more active role for it is on the agenda. Security limits keep most of his meetings inside greater Damascus.
For al-Shaibani the visit was worth more than its contents. He called it a declaration of Syria's transition to the role of an active partner in the United Nations, with significance beyond its official dimensions, and said the two sides discussed recovery under a single strategy for a Syrian-led process.
Türkiye has been building the same road for months. Two days before Guterres landed, Ankara and Damascus signed an agreement covering cultural centers in each other's countries, which puts Yunus Emre Institute branches across Syria teaching Turkish and running cultural programs. Türkiye's ambassador in Damascus, Nuh Yılmaz, signed it with Qutayba Kadish of the Syrian Foreign Ministry, and said relations are moving fast on the political will of the two presidents, with the legal framework being built to match. The institute had centers in Damascus and Aleppo before 2011 and shut them when the war started.
That agreement is a small piece of a larger Turkish position: warships back at Latakia, a welcome for the new parliament in Damascus, and a terrorism designation Washington moved to lift after talks in Ankara.
Then there is what the decade actually cost, which no palace meeting closes.
Two days before Guterres reached Damascus, Karla Quintana, who heads the UN's Independent Institution on Missing Persons in Syria, stood at UN headquarters in New York and said the country has one of the highest numbers of missing people in the world, in absolute terms and relative to its population, after more than five decades of torture, detention and disappearances.
"Every Syrian has a missing person," she said. "And every family in Syria knows someone that is missing."
Her institution processed more than 75,000 documents in the past year, nine times the year before. Asked whether any of the missing might still be alive, she was careful. She has names for a little more than 600 cases. Some of those people are confirmed alive. Some have already gone home.
Six hundred names, against hundreds of thousands. Readmitting a state to the world takes a vote and an airplane. The rest of it does not.