Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani spent Thursday, 2 July 2026, moving between the offices of nearly every senior figure in Beirut, and left with a signed agreement to build a joint higher committee with Lebanon.
It was his second official trip to Lebanon since the new leadership took over in Damascus. In one day he sat with President Joseph Aoun, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, Grand Mufti Abdel Latif Derian, and the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt.
The committee, which al-Shaibani called the Joint Higher Committee for Cooperation and Partnership with Lebanon, is meant to pull ministers from both governments into regular sessions on political, economic, and security questions. Salam listed the first items: electricity interconnection between the two countries, transport, trade, and easier cross-border movement.
The two sides also agreed to set up a joint business council, with its first meeting planned for Damascus.
"Soon we will begin to see not only the establishment of the joint committee, but also the concrete results of its work," Salam said after the signing at the Grand Serail.
Al-Shaibani framed the deal as a way past what he called "the negative legacy" between the two states. Syria wants to leave behind the inheritance both peoples have carried, he said, and build something for the next generation.
What Lebanon wanted to hear was a promise to stay out of its politics. Aoun said Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa had pledged exactly that. Damascus "will not stand with one party against another, but rather alongside all Lebanese," Aoun quoted him as saying.
Aoun put it plainly to a Maronite League delegation: the visit "removes the concerns of some Lebanese" that al-Sharaa meant to interfere. Cooperation, the Syrians stressed, would run "from state to state," not through any faction. For a country that spent decades under Syrian military and intelligence weight, the wording carried the freight.
Jumblatt, who met al-Shaibani to talk about Syria's unity and territorial integrity, was blunt in the Turkish account of the day: "The old regime has ended. We must open a new page in political and strategic relations."
Then there is the harder file. Al-Shaibani said the question of Syrians held in Lebanese prisons could be settled soon. Most were detained during the civil war that followed 2011, often accused of backing groups opposed to the Assad government, and many case files are still open. In February 2026 the two governments signed an agreement to regulate transferring those prisoners to Syria. The grounds for holding people who supported the uprising, al-Shaibani argued, disappeared when the old government fell.
The same argument is now being made in Washington, about Syria itself. A bipartisan trio of US lawmakers, Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Elizabeth Warren and Representative Joe Wilson, wrote to Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Thursday urging that Syria be struck from the state sponsors of terrorism list. Syria has carried the label since 1979, alongside Cuba, North Korea, and Iran. The lawmakers called it the "most significant remaining legal impediment" to reconstruction, and pointed to Damascus joining the US-led coalition against Daesh. A State Department official said the review "is ongoing" and gave no timeline.
For Türkiye, the principal external backer of post-Assad Damascus, this is the outcome Ankara has argued for since December 2024: a Syria that rejoins its neighborhood through institutions rather than proxies. Sanctions relief and a lifted terrorism tag are the gate to the reconstruction Turkish firms expect to help lead, and every step Damascus takes toward normalization eases the refugee and border pressures Ankara has carried the longest.