US expands travel ban to Palestinian Authority passport holders

Washington said the measures were taken due to "severe deficiencies in screening, vetting, and information-sharing" among the affected countries.

The measures are an extension of Trump’s existing travel ban, which was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2018, with the court rejecting claims that the policy was discriminatory.

That version of the ban was repealed by the Biden administration, but was reinstated when Trump returned to office earlier this year.

The introduction of a full ban on entry for Syrian passport holders may represent something of a setback in relations between Washington and Damascus, which have improved significantly since the toppling of Bashar al-Assad last December.

New interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly an Al Qaeda-affiliated militant with a $10 million US bounty on his head, made an unprecedented visit to the White House last month.

Under the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Julani, al-Sharaa led the Al-Nusra Front, the official affiliate of Al Qaeda in Syria. Al-Nusra’s merger with several other Islamist militant groups established Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the movement which al-Sharaa now leads.

Since he took power, the US has lifted its crippling sanctions on Syria and both Washington and London have removed HTS from their lists of proscribed terror groups.

Syria also joined the US-led “Global Coalition to Defeat Isis”, which Tom Barrack, the US special envoy for Syria, called “a pivotal moment in Syria’s history and in the global fight against terrorism”.

However, there remains dissatisfaction among some elements of Trump’s voter base that he is engaging diplomatically with a former jihadi terrorist.

Laura Loomer, an influential far-right activist and close Trump ally, criticised the administration for meeting al-Sharaa, claiming he should have been arrested when he set foot on US soil.

"Sometimes I feel like some of the people who work for President Trump deliberately go out of their way to sabotage him,” she wrote on X.

“Who said ‘let’s invite the Isis terrorist to the White House for a photo op in the Oval Office the day before Veterans Day?’”

Neither al-Nusra nor HTS are affiliated with Islamic State and both opposed the group during the Syrian Civil War, likely due to its ideological disputes with Al Qaeda and the hostility between the two terror organisations, though they have cooperated against common enemies at times.