“Would I have preferred Ahmed Al-Chareh to shake hands with my German colleague? The answer is yes. Was that the purpose of this trip? The answer is no,” Jean-Noël Barrot, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, declared on RTL radio on Sunday.
Under European mandate, Jean-Noël Barrot and the head of German diplomacy Annalena Baerbock met the Islamist Ahmad Al-Chareh, the new Syrian leader on Friday. Images of the latter refraining from shaking hands with the head of German diplomacy made the rounds on social networks.
According to Der Spiegel, the German minister was not surprised by the absence of a handshake, she had been prepared for it. She and her counterpart knew that the new Muslim male leaders would not shake a woman's hand. After landing, it was like this with the two protocol men who welcomed them on Syrian soil.
Women's rights discussed during the exchange
But the Franco-German “couple” agreed that Jean-Noël Barrot would not shake the Syrian leader’s hand either. In the video, we can see that the Frenchman first put his hand on his chest in greeting, in the presidential palace in Damascus. When Ahmed Al-Chareh extended his hand to the head of the Quai d'Orsay, the two men just touched their fingertips.
When everyone left their host in a hurry, “there was no more handshake,” the ecologist explained to Spiegel. She assured that she had addressed “women’s rights” as “indicators of the freedom of a society”.
Barrot highlights chemical weapons held by Syria
The head of German diplomacy did not comment on this absence of a handshake. And Jean-Noël Barrot felt that this was not the “purpose” of the visit. As a result of “the action of the Bashar al-Assad regime, there are chemical weapons everywhere in Syria which were designed by this regime, (…) turned by this regime against its people, which are disseminated and which could fall into the wrong hands,” he added.
“There are tens of thousands of Daesh terrorist fighters in Syria today (Islamic State group in Arabic) who are detained in prisons in the north-east of the country,” he also argued on RTL.
“If I don’t go to Syria, who will protect the French against these threats, against their security? “. The first steps of the leader of the radical Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTC), who led the coalition that seized Damascus, are being closely scrutinized.
The visit to Damascus by the two ministers was the first at this level between officials of the great Western powers and the one who took the reins of the country on December 8, after the flight of President Bashar al-Assad.
