French president meets with Syrian opposition

PARIS — Days after recognizing the newly formed Syrian opposition council as the “sole representative” of the Syrian people, President Francois Hollande of France met with its leaders in Paris on Saturday and agreed to install a new Syrian ambassador in France.

The French move comes even before the new council, the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, has established a provisional government, which is expected to happen soon.

After the meeting with the council’s leader, Sheik Ahmad Moaz al-Khatib, and his deputies, Hollande said that his government would raise the issue of lifting a European Union arms embargo against all Syrian forces at a meeting of foreign ministers on Monday in Brussels.

The United States and Europe have been reluctant to provide arms to Syrian rebel forces, which have been joined by Islamist fighters from other countries.

But Hollande and his government, already providing nonlethal assistance, have been discussing how to provide military aid, too, so the rebels can better defend their territory. Without a stable opposition zone of reasonable size inside Syria, it is hard for the West to provide military aid, as it did for the Libyan opposition.

In a statement, Hollande said the arms embargo remained a delicate question.

“While the Syrians need military means,” he said, Western governments want to assure themselves that the weapons are under control.

Hollande said that al-Khatib, a former imam of the historic Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, reassured him that the coalition sought to unify the Syrian people.

Al-Khatib said the new envoy to France would be Mounzir Makhous, describing him as “one of the first to speak of liberty” in Syria and an Alawite, the minority sect to which Syria’s president belongs.

More than 36,000 people have been killed since the Syrian uprising against President Bashar Assad began in March 2011, and the new coalition is pressing for the means to defend Syrian civilians.

On Saturday, Syrian rebels took control of the Hamdan airport in the oil-rich province of Deir el-Zour along the border with Iraq after days of heavy fighting with Assad’s forces, Rami Abdul-Rahman, the chief of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said.

The airport, near the border town of al-Boukamal, has been turned into a military base during Syria’s 20 months of conflict.