WASHINGTON —  Senior U.S. diplomats traveled to Damascus Friday and held a first-ever meeting with the rebels who toppled longtime dictator Bashar Assad. Washington officially regards the rebel group as terrorists.

U.S. officials said they pressed the transitional government established by rebels to respect the rights of Syria’s numerous ethnic and religious sects as well as women. They said they received new leads on the fate of long-missing American journalist Austin Tice but could not reach a conclusion about his whereabouts or whether he is alive.

In an initial gesture of goodwill, the Biden administration canceled a $10-million bounty it had placed on the head of the rebels’ leader, Ahmed Sharaa, also known as Abu Mohammad Julani.

Barbara Leaf, the top U.S. diplomat for the Middle East and leader of the delegation, said it made sense to remove the reward since she and the other officials were meeting with him face-to-face.

Leaf was accompanied by Roger Carstens, the administration’s lead official for hostage negotiations, and former special envoy for Syria Daniel Rubinstein. They spoke by telephone to reporters after departing Damascus.

It was the first time U.S. officials have formally visited Damascus since the U.S. Embassy there was shuttered in 2012 as the country descended into a savage civil war. Backed by Russia and Iran, the Assad regime is believed to have killed tens of thousands of people, while many more were tortured in crowded, dismal secret prisons.

Assad fled the country two weeks ago as rebels led by Sharaa’s group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, stormed Damascus. It was a swift and spectacular collapse of a dynastic regime that terrorized the nation for half a century.

But the next steps are complicated for U.S. policymakers. Washington has formally labeled HTS a terrorist group. HTS traces its roots to terror groups Islamic State and Al Qaeda but claims it has reformed. The designation carries with it numerous economic sanctions and complicates assistance from aid groups or other parties.

Leaf would not say whether HTS would be removed from the terror list or if sanctions would be lifted.

Asked if she believed Sharaa had become a more moderate leader, Leaf seemed willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. She described him as “pragmatic” and the talks as “quite good, very productive, detailed,” covering “a wide set of issues, domestic and external.”

“We’ve been hearing this for some time, some very pragmatic and moderate statements on various issues from women’s rights to protection of equal rights for all communities, etc.,” Leaf said. “It was a good first meeting. We will judge by deeds, not just by words. Deeds are the critical thing.”

Carstens said U.S. officials had believed Assad maintained around a dozen clandestine prisons, but as victims emerge and information comes to light, it appears there could have been 40 or more. While the U.S. has been working with what Carstens called credible evidence that Tice, the journalist, may have been held in as many as six prisons, new information indicates he might have been at one or two others. Searching is slow-going because the U.S. still has a limited presence in Syria, primarily a few hundred troops but no diplomatic or law enforcement personnel.

“We’re going to be like bulldogs on this,” Carstens said. “We’re not going to stop until we find the information that we need to conclude what has happened to Austin, where he is, and to return him home to his family.”

Tice, a freelance reporter who would be 43 years old now, was snatched by gunmen at a checkpoint near Damascus in August 2012 and has not been heard from since.

As President Biden’s term comes to an end, he is reportedly considering commuting the sentences of most, if not all, of the 40 men on the federal government’s death row.

The Wall Street Journal, citing sources familiar with the matter, reported that the move would frustrate President-elect Trump’s plan to streamline executions as he takes office in January.

Attorney General Merrick Garland, who oversees federal prisons, recommended that Biden commute all but a handful of egregious sentences, the sources said.

The outlet reported that possible exceptions could include Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 2013 Boston Marathon bomber who killed three and wounded more than 250; Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people in the 2018 attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh; and Dylann Roof, who in 2015 killed nine at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

TRUMP EXPECTED TO END BIDEN-ERA DEATH PENALTY PAUSE, EXPAND TO MORE FEDERAL INMATES

Those who could see their death sentences commuted to life in prison include an ex-Marine who killed two young girls and later a female naval officer, a Las Vegas man convicted of kidnapping and killing a 12-year-old girl, a Chicago podiatrist who fatally shot a patient to keep her from testifying in a Medicare fraud investigation and two men convicted in a kidnapping-for-ransom scheme that resulted in the killings of five Russian and Georgian immigrants.

TRUMP VOWS TO CREATE COMPENSATION FUND FOR VICTIMS OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT CRIME

The move came after Biden, a lifelong Catholic, spoke with Pope Francis Thursday. In his weekly prayer, Pope Francis asked for the commutation of America’s condemned inmates.

A decision from the president could come by Christmas, some of sources said. The outlet noted that the biggest question is the scope of the commutation of the death row inmates.

President Biden speaks at a podium (AP )

Biden is the first president to openly oppose capital punishment, and his 2020 campaign website declared he would “work to pass legislation to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level and incentivize states to follow the federal government’s example.”

In January 2021, Biden initially considered an executive order, sources familiar with the matter told The Associated Press, but the White House did not issue one.

Six months into the administration, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced a moratorium on federal capital punishment to study it further. The narrow action has meant there have been no federal executions under Biden.

In the six weeks since Donald Trump won the presidential election, Europe has been bracing for a U.S. administration that could strain traditional transatlantic alliances.

That sense of uncertainty has just been turbocharged by a disruptive new force: multibillionaire Elon Musk, who has made it clear he intends to leave his mark on politics and policy not only in Washington but in Europe as well.

On Friday, as U.S. lawmakers were racing to avert a looming government shutdown, Musk used his social media platform X to tout his strong support for a far-right political party in Germany that is looking to increase its clout in the wake of this month’s meltdown of the three-party ruling coalition of Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

“Only the AfD can save Germany,” Musk wrote, using the German initials for Alternative for Germany, the party best known for its stridently anti-immigrant stance, longtime ties to neo-Nazis and the “extremist” designation that Germany’s domestic intelligence service has given its youth wing.

The world’s richest man had previously made provocative statements about German politics, but the timing of his latest remarks — coinciding with signals he intends to leverage his Trump administration position leading an advisory commission on government efficiency into a wide-ranging role in the new U.S. administration — stirred unease not only in Germany but across Europe.

Establishment parties and governments elsewhere on the continent are feeling vulnerable after a series of anti-system jolts, including the ouster this month of France’s prime minister, Michel Barnier, in a heavy blow to President Emmanuel Macron, who appointed him.

Mainstay organizations including the European Union and NATO also are watching and worrying over the potential for destabilizing moves by Trump that could include protracted trade disputes and a withdrawal of crucial U.S. military support for Ukraine as it seeks to fight off a nearly three-year-old full-scale invasion by Russia.

Musk’s foray into German politics came just after far-right British politician Nigel Farage, who for years has been a fixture in Trump’s orbit, declared this week that the South African-born Tesla and Space X magnate was considering a historically large contribution to his Reform U.K. party — prompting calls for swift action to tighten Britain’s rules on political donations, which are already far stricter than those in the United States.

In Germany, Europe’s economic powerhouse and political center of gravity, Musk’s commentary roiled the political establishment — and drew expressions of glee from supporters of the AfD, whose nationalist-populist message has helped it make inroads this year in state and European Parliament elections.

The party hopes to mount a strong challenge to Friedrich Merz, the frontrunner to replace Scholz in a national vote expected in February, but other leading political blocs have already declared they would not accept the AfD as a coalition partner.

AfD’s leader Alice Weidel quickly thanked Musk for his online vote of confidence, declaring: “You are perfectly right!”

In a video posted on X shortly after the billionaire’s accolade landed, she said the AfD “is indeed the one and only alternative for our country — our last option, if you ask me!”

Scholz has been something of a punching bag for his opponents across the political spectrum over Germany’s floundering economy, but the Musk broadside prompted some of his chief rivals to come to his defense — often with acid commentary about Musk.

“We usually hear that Elon Musk is this gifted wunderkind, but when I hear these comments, I have to doubt that,” Alexander Throm of the center-right Christian Democratic Union, which is leading opinion polls in advance of February’s vote, told the public broadcaster Deutsche Welle.

Another Christian Democratic politician, lawmaker Dennis Radtke, branded Musk’s remarks as interference in German elections. Speaking to the Handelsblatt daily, he called the comments “threatening, irritating and unacceptable.”

Rare agreement came from a leading politician in what is considered the most leftist party in Germany’s political mix. “He’s not really contributing anything, policywise,” Clara Buenger of the Left Party said of Musk.

“He doesn’t really know how political discussions work in Germany,” she said.

Scholz himself adhered at least in part to his typical low-key political style in responding to this episode. Without naming Musk, he pointed out that Germany’s political system allows for freedom of expression, which “also applies to multibillionaires.”

But the chancellor used sharper than usual language, for him, to challenge Musk’s characterization of the AfD as a national savior. Freedom to speak out, he said pointedly, “also means that you’re allowed to say things which aren’t correct, and aren’t good political advice.”

Musk also had jeered at the collapse of the governing coalition, and at one point tweeted in German that the chancellor was a “fool.” Scholz responded at the time that the remark was “not very friendly.”

The billionaire entrepreneur-turned-efficiency expert has opined previously about the AfD, expressing his bafflement at the mainstream unease it prompts within Germany over echoes of the country’s Nazi past.

The country has legal prohibitions on use of Third Reich-style language and symbols, and there has been more than one case involving prosecution of an AfD figure for flouting those laws.

“They keep saying ‘far right,’ but the policies of AfD that I’ve read about don’t sound extremist,” Musk posted in June. “Maybe I’m missing something.”

In the United States, Trump’s elevation of Musk has prompted little opposition from within his own Republican party. In Europe, however, there is considerably more wariness.

After British politician Farage was pictured posing this week with Musk at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, and Farage confirmed that a potentially huge donation from Musk to his party could be in play — $100 million, according to at least one British report — some British lawmakers and transparency advocates urged that measures be put in place to prevent such an unprecedentedly large infusion of foreign cash.

While Britain curtails how much political parties are allowed to spend on elections, there is no ceiling on donations from within the United Kingdom. Musk could get around that with the British registration of the British arm of X.

“It’s crucial that U.K. voters have trust in the financing of our political system,” the chief executive of Britain’s Electoral Commission, Vijay Rangarajan, told the Guardian newspaper. “The system needs strengthening.”

Musk has made clear his disdain for Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the left-leaning Labor Party, and has often voiced criticism of British policies on immigration and policing.

Farage, for his part, cites Trump as a populist role model, and shares the president-elect’s antipathy toward bodies such as the European Union. His Reform party picked up about 14% of the vote in June elections, its strongest showing ever.