Foreign affairs minister Caspar Veldkamp has urged Syria’s interim government to respect the rights of minorities after the Dutch special envoy, Gijs Gerlag, visited Damascus for the first time since the fall of the Assad regime.

Gerlag spent three days meeting representative of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist group that deposed Bashar Al-Assad last month, as well as the UN envoy, NGOs working in Syria and Christian community leaders.

The Dutch foreign ministry said the aim of the talks was to gauge the internal security situation and emphasise the importance of an “inclusive political transition”.

“It is essential that Christians, Kurds and other minorities form part of this process and human rights are respected,” Veldkamp said.

The minister ruled out an immediate reopening of the Netherlands’ embassy, which was closed in 2018 in response to the brutal repression of Syrian citizens by Assad’s security forces.

A few weeks before the downfall of Assad the Dutch government had said it wanted to declare parts of Syria safe so that it could send back some of the 150,000 refugees currently living in the Netherlands. Syrians accounted for more than 40% of all asylum seekers arriving last year.

The right-wing four-way coalition, headed by the anti-Islam PVV party, has made implementing the “strictest asylum policy ever” its number one priority. PVV leader Geert Wilders said after the downfall of Assad that Syrians in the Netherlands who celebrated his departure should be sent back to the country.

The leader of HTS, Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, has promoted himself as a moderate leader since leading the successful uprising against Assad.

But in the past the group has been associated with Al-Qaeda and IS, and HTS is proscribed as a terorist organisation by the United States government.

The US is expected to ease restrictions on providing humanitarian aid and essential services such as electricity to Syria while maintaining sanctions on the country, according to Reuters, in a gesture designed to encourage good relations with the new government.