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.
The latest. Guterres closed the visit on Sunday asking for every Assad-era sanction to be lifted at once, and said UN humanitarian aid is meeting only about 20 percent of Syrians' needs. He called Israel's violations of the 1974 disengagement agreement unacceptable and said the UN will hand the Security Council a comprehensive report on them at the end of this month. Israeli forces spent the same day pushing toward villages in the western countryside of Dera and shelling the Kuneytra countryside. President Ahmad al-Sharaa told Al Jazeera that Damascus is working toward a security agreement with Israel, and that Syria needs to come off the US list of state sponsors of terrorism for sanctions relief to mean much. Guterres flies to Cyprus on Monday.
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.
On Saturday Guterres went to look at where a good many of them were last seen. He toured Sednaya military prison, north of Damascus, accompanied by Syria's UN envoy Ibrahim Olabi, according to the Syrian state news agency. Sednaya was the most notorious detention site of the Baath period, a place associated with systematic torture, enforced disappearance and extrajudicial killing, where thousands of prisoners are reported to have died.
"The Sednaya military prison shows how horrendous the oppression was during the previous Syrian regime," he said afterward. Speaking to reporters in Damascus at the end of the visit, he said he felt deep horror at the accounts of what happened there, where tens of thousands are alleged to have been killed and tortured.
He came out of it asking for money and for law. Every sanction imposed on Syria under the Assad government should be lifted immediately, he said. The international community should provide political, economic and practical support, and rebuild basic services, infrastructure, education and health. Syria needs help to let refugees and displaced people return safely, voluntarily and with dignity.
"The Syrian people have shown extraordinary resilience in recent years," he said. "The Syrian people should not carry the burden of recovery alone."
The UN, he said, is ready to support accountability, transitional justice, human rights and reconciliation, and to back the writing of a permanent constitution and free elections in which every part of society takes part. He met the speaker of the People's Assembly, Abdulhamid Awak, and said he was struck by the meeting and by the size of the agenda in front of the new parliament.
On Israel he was blunt. Violations of Syria's sovereignty and territorial integrity, he told reporters in Damascus, "are unacceptable and must end." In a written statement he named the agreement Israel is breaking. "Syria's sovereignty, independence, unity & territorial integrity must be fully respected," it read. "Violations by Israel of the 1974 Disengagement of Forces Agreement are unacceptable & must stop." The UN will give the Security Council a comprehensive report on those violations at the end of this month.
He also put a number on the shortfall he had come to talk about. UN humanitarian assistance is currently meeting about 20 percent of what Syrians need.
While he spoke, the army was moving
On Sunday Israeli forces shelled the area around Tarnaca village in the northern countryside of Kuneytra, Syrian state television reported, and advanced toward Mariye and Arıda in the Yarmouk basin, in the western countryside of Dera. Three military vehicles and an earthmover cleared a road and set up a checkpoint inside Arıda. Leaflets came down warning residents not to obstruct the vehicles, Syria's state news agency SANA said in an account carried by Al Jazeera.
None of that is new in kind. Israel seized the UN-controlled buffer zone after Assad fell, declaring the 1974 agreement collapsed, and, on Anadolu Ajansı's count, has since built 10 bases and military positions across Dera and Kuneytra. Israeli officials say they intend to stay in southern Syria, in what they call a security zone. Al-Sharaa has said Israel carried out more than 1,000 airstrikes and about 400 ground operations in Syria between 8 December 2024 and 18 July 2025, a count that is his.
He is negotiating anyway. In an interview with Al Jazeera broadcast the same evening, al-Sharaa said Damascus is working toward a security agreement with Israel involving a group of countries, and that Syria has no interest in a confrontation.
Readmitting a state to the world takes a vote and an airplane. The rest of it takes what Karla Quintana is doing, one document at a time.