<h6><strong>Eduardo González</strong></h6> <h4><strong>The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, will undertake a new tour of the Middle East next week, which will include Lebanon, where General Joseph Aoun was named President of the country on Thursday after more than two years without a head of state due to a lack of consensus, and Syria, just a month after the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime and where he will preside over the raising of the flag at the Spanish Embassy, which has remained lowered since the ambassador left in 2012.</strong></h4> According to the Ministry in a press release, Albares will begin his tour in Beirut, where he plans to hold high-level political meetings to address the situation in the country. Specifically, the Government of Spain welcomed this Thursday the decision of the Lebanese Parliament to elect General Joseph Aoun to the post of President of the Lebanese Republic and expressed its desire to “continue working closely with the Lebanese authorities in favour of peace, sovereignty and stability in Lebanon and the entire region.” In the Lebanese capital, the minister will discuss bilateral relations and Spain's contribution to Lebanon through Spanish Cooperation. In addition, Albares, who already visited Lebanon last year at this time, plans to meet with the United Nations Special Coordinator, Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, and the Special Humanitarian Coordinator, Imran Riza, to discuss the humanitarian situation in the region. The minister's agenda also includes a meeting with Spanish General Aroldo Lázaro, Commander-in-Chief of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), and with the new president (and head of the Lebanese Armed Forces), General Joseph Aoun, with whom he will assess compliance with the ceasefire agreement reached on 27 November (about to complete the 60-day period set by the agreement), Spain's support for the redeployment of the Lebanese Armed Forces in the south of the country and the role of UNIFIL in this new phase, of which Spain is one of the main contributors. <h5><strong>Syria</strong></h5> The following day, the Spanish minister plans to travel to Damascus, which will be his first visit to the country, five weeks after the fall of the Bashar Al Assad regime. In this country, the Foreign Minister plans to meet with leaders of the country's ethnic and religious minorities and with women from civil society, as well as with humanitarian organisations that carry out their work on the ground. He will also visit the Sednaya prison, in memory of the victims of the repression of the Al Assad regime. Albares will take advantage of his trip to pay tribute to the work of the staff of the Spanish Embassy in Syria with a personal meeting and a visit to the facilities, where he will preside over the raising of the flag. The flag was lowered with the departure of the ambassador in 2012 and has not been raised since then. The Embassy was reduced to the bare minimum in 2012 after Spain decided to withdraw its ambassador in Damascus in retaliation for the repressive policy of the Al Assad regime against anti-government protests. Since then, the representation has been headed by a chargé d'affaires with residence in Beirut. Foreign Ministry sources have specified that, at the moment, the appointment of a new ambassador in Syria is not planned. On December 23, the Council of Ministers appointed diplomat Antonio González-Zavala as special envoy for Syria, whose mission, as Albares himself announced a week earlier, will be to “transmit clear red lines” to the new authorities that have emerged from the overthrow of Bashar al Assad’s regime. Among the aforementioned “red lines,” Albares mentioned “that the future of Syria be a peaceful future, that what is today a military movement become a political movement (in reference to Hayat Tahrir al Sham, HTS, the jihadist armed group that led the overthrow of Al Assad) and that it be an inclusive future with scrupulous respect for ethnic and religious minorities.”
