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One year after ousting Bashar al-Assad, Ahmed al-Sharaa has restored Syria’s international standing and won sanctions relief.But analysts warn the former jihadist still needs to secure trust on the home front.Sectarian bloodshed in the country’s Alawite and Druze minority heartlands — alongside ongoing Israeli military operations — have shaken Syria as President Sharaa tries to lead the country out of 14 years of war.”Syria has opened a new chapter that many once thought impossible,” said Nanar Hawach, senior Syria analyst at the International Crisis Group, citing relaunched diplomatic ties and foreign investment.But he added: “International rehabilitation means little if all Syrians don’t feel safe walking their own streets.”US President Donald Trump has taken a particular shining to the 43-year-old, a surprise political victory for a former jihadist who once had a US bounty on his head due to his ties to Al-Qaeda.Sharaa has toured capitals from the Gulf to Europe to Washington since his Islamist alliance toppled Assad on December 8 last year, ending more than half a century of the family’s iron-fisted rule.Washington and the UN Security Council have removed him from their respective “terrorism” and sanctions lists, and a delegation from the world body visited Damascus for the first time this week.The United States, the European Union and Britain have lifted major economic sanctions on Syria, and Damascus has announced investment deals for infrastructure, transport and energy.Sharaa has even visited Russia, whose military pounded his forces during the war and which is now home to an exiled Assad.”Sharaa won abroad, but the real verdict comes at home,” Hawach said.- ‘Real accountability’ -Critics say Syria’s temporary constitution fails to reflect the country’s ethnic and religious diversity and concentrates power in the hands of a president appointed for a five-year transition.The new authorities have disbanded armed factions, including Islamist and jihadist fighters, but absorbed most into the new-look army and security forces, including some foreign fighters.And some government forces or their allies have been implicated in outbreaks of sectarian violence.The Alawite community massacres in March, killed more than 1,700 people, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.And clashes in July in south Syria’s Druze-majority Sweida province left more than 2,000 dead, including hundreds of Druze civilians.Authorities have announced investigations into the bloodshed and have arrested and put some suspects on trial.Nicholas Heras, from the New Lines Institute, said Sharaa “has twice failed as a leader of national reconciliation” — during the violence against the Alawites and the Druze.Heras told AFP questions remain over “the extent to which he personally wants to rein in the militant Islamist militias that played the strongest role in bringing him to power in Damascus”.Sharaa’s position, he said, remains precarious “because he does not command a unified security apparatus that can enforce the rules made by his government.”- ‘Terrifying’ -Gamal Mansour, a researcher at the University of Toronto, said “factional leaders who are essentially warlords” have taken up official roles, contributing to a “crisis of trust” among minorities.However, “most Syrians believe Sharaa is the only option that provides guarantees,” he said, calling the prospect of a power vacuum “terrifying”.Just keeping the country together is a major task, with some on the coast and in Sweida urging succession and the Kurds seeking decentralisation, which Damascus has rejected.A Kurdish administration in the northeast has agreed to integrate its institutions into the central government by year-end but progress has stalled.Adding to pressures is neighbouring Israel, which has repeatedly bombed Syria and wants to impose a demilitarised zone in the south.Israel’s forces remain in a UN-patrolled buffer zone on the occupied Golan Heights and conduct regular incursions deeper into Syria despite the two sides holding direct talks.On Monday, Trump told Israel to avoid destabilising Syria and its new leadership.In October, committees selected new members of parliament, but the process excluded areas outside government control and Sharaa is still to appoint 70 of the 210 representatives.

With US President Donald Trump and other sceptics calling climate change a hoax, the UN’s climate science body must tell the world in a “very clear way” that humans are heating the planet, its chairman told AFP.Jim Skea, a Scottish professor, chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which held a five-day meeting in a skyscraper outside Paris this week to begin drafting the next major UN climate assessment.The gathering of more than 600 scientists from around the world, which ends Friday, kicked off a process that will culminate in the publication of the massive report by 2028 or 2029.Established in 1988, the IPCC assesses global climate research and issues comprehensive reports every five to seven years to inform policymakers and guide climate negotiations.QUESTION: You said recently it is “almost inevitable” the world will cross the 1.5C warming threshold. If this happens before the next IPCC assessment is published, what should it emphasise to remain relevant and impactful?ANSWER: “The messages are that if we want to return global warming to 1.5C, it’s quite clear what steps need to be taken. We do need very significant reductions in emissions from land use and from energy. And we also need to start thinking about removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at scale. And there are a lot of knowledge gaps associated with that.”QUESTION: France voiced strong support for the IPCC this week, saying it stood for its scientists in the face of rising climate scepticism. You met with President Emmanuel Macron. How important was it for the IPCC to have this kind of backing in this context?ANSWER: “It’s really important. It was really welcome to get that level of support from the French government, from multiple people. I mean, the head of state, three senior ministers, that was a significant level of support and it gave a lot of impulse to the scientists. When I talked to the scientists afterwards, they were very pleased to have that level of support. It gave them confidence and enthusiasm about moving forward.” QUESTION: How will the IPCC ensure that its findings cut through misinformation and reach the public effectively when you have people like US President Donald Trump calling climate change a hoax?A: “We need to keep communicating the science in a very clear way. I mean, we concluded in our last report, very simple conclusion: It is unequivocal that human beings are causing the climate change that we are already seeing. And we need to keep emphasising that message and we can support it with several different types of explanation, lines of evidence.”QUESTION: The US government is absent from the IPCC and is not funding American academics participating in the process, but are you concerned that it could intervene at the approval stage to block the final report?ANSWER: “We still have a huge US presence in IPCC. We’ve got nearly 50 US authors at this meeting whose travel and subsistence is being supported by US philanthropies and who were nominated by US observer organisations. …”The approval sessions — when we finish the reports — have always been difficult sessions because we need scientists and governments to agree down to the last word and comma. And I don’t think it’s got really substantially more difficult over time to do that.”There’s only been one occasion in IPCC history where a summary for policymakers was not approved and was passed over to the next session. And this wasn’t recent, this was in 1995. So it’s always been difficult. But we’ve always overcome these hurdles.”QUESTION: France and other countries want the IPCC assessment to be published in 2028 ahead of the COP33 climate summit in India. French diplomats say Saudi Arabia and India are pushing for 2029. Is it important for the report to be published in 2028?ANSWER: “Whether or not it is published in time for the global stocktake is frankly, a matter for the governments. For the scientists here, what the question is, is the timetable compatible with the time needed to produce an assessment? And frankly, that time should not be too short or not be too long.”QUESTION: What is your message to governments and ordinary people as you begin this new cycle of work?ANSWER: “Wait with bated breath for what we are going to come out with in roughly three years down the line. There are new areas of research, there are new knowledge gaps that we need to explore, including this issue of, is it possible to limit warming to 1.5C in the long term?”