DAMASCUS: Holding elections in Syria could take up to four years, Syria’s de facto leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa said in remarks to be broadcast on Sunday, the first time he has commented on a possible electoral timetable since Bashar Al-Assad was ousted this month. Drafting a new constitution could take up to three years, Sharaa said in written excerpts from the interview with the Saudi state-owned broadcaster Al Arabiya, due to be transmitted later on Sunday. He also said it would take about a year for Syrians to see drastic changes.

The comment from Sharaa, who leads the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group that ousted Assad on Dec 8, comes as the new government in Damascus has been seeking to reassure its neighbors that it has moved away from its roots in Islamist militancy. The group’s lightning campaign ended a 13-year civil war but has left a host of questions about the future of a multiethnic country previously held together by decades of authoritarian Assad family rule, and where foreign states including Turkey and Russia have strong and potentially competing interests.

Sharaa said HTS, formerly known as the Nusra Front, would be dissolved at a national dialogue conference. It has repeatedly vowed to protect minority groups, who fear the new rulers could seek to impose an Islamist government and has warned of attempts to incite sectarian strife. In the interview, Sharaa said Syria shared strategic interests with Russia, a close Assad ally during the long civil war which has military bases in the country, reiterating conciliatory signals his government has made previously.

Sharaa said earlier this month that Syria’s relations with Russia should serve common interests. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the status of Russia’s military bases would be the subject of negotiations with the new leadership in Damascus. “It is a question not only of maintaining our bases or strongholds, but also of the conditions of their operation, maintenance and provision, and interaction with the local side,” he said in an interview with Russian news agency RIA published on Sunday.

Sharaa also said he hoped the administration of US President-elect Donald Trump would lift sanctions imposed on Syria. Senior US diplomats who visited Damascus this month said Sharaa came across as pragmatic and that Washington has decided to remove a $10 million bounty on the HTS leader’s head.

Syria’s new authorities have arrested nearly 300 people, including informants, pro-regime fighters and former soldiers, in a crackdown on loyalists to Assad, a monitor said Sunday. The security forces of the new administration launched a large-scale operation on Thursday against Assad’s militias. “In less than a week, nearly 300 people have been detained in Damascus and its suburbs, as well as in Homs, Hama, Tartus, Latakia and even Deir Ezzor,” said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor.

The official Syrian news agency SANA also reported arrests this week targeting “Assad militia members” in Hama and Latakia provinces, where weapons and ammunition were seized. Among those arrested, according to the Observatory, were former regime informants, pro-Iranian fighters and lower-ranking military officers accused of killings and torture, Abdel Rahman said.

Abdel Rahman said that “the campaign is ongoing, but no prominent figures have been arrested” except for General Mohammed Kanjo Hassan, the former head of military justice under Assad, who reportedly oversaw thousands of death sentences following summary trials at Saydnaya prison. Referring to social media videos showing armed men abusing detainees and even carrying out summary executions, Abdel Rahman said: “Some individuals, including informants, were immediately executed after being detained”. The arrests were reportedly taking place “with the cooperation of local populations”, Abdel Rahman added.

Anas Khattab, the new head of General Intelligence, has pledged to overhaul the security apparatus. “The security establishment will be reformed after dissolving all services and restructuring them in a way that honors our people,” Anas Khattab said, two days after being appointed to his post by the country’s new leadership.

In a statement carried by SANA, he stressed the suffering of Syrians “under the oppression and tyranny of the old regime, through its various security apparatuses that sowed corruption and inflicted torture on the people”. Prisons were emptied after Assad’s fall as officials and agents of the deposed regime fled. Most of these installations are now guarded by fighters of HTS.

Numerous Syrians have rushed to former detention centers in the hope of finding traces of relatives and friends who went missing during the 13 years of a devastating civil war that left more than a half million dead. “The security services of the old regime were many and varied, with different names and affiliations, but all had in common that they had been imposed on the oppressed people for more than five decades,” Khattab continued. – Agencies