It was another call to action on Friday for the South Korean protest movement that had faced down security forces just a month ago to resist President Yoon Suk Yeol’s declaration of martial law.

Those first mass protests got results: Mr. Yoon’s startling declaration of martial law on Dec. 3 was reversed, then the National Assembly impeached him and opened an investigation into whether he had led an insurrection.

But in the weeks since, paralysis and polarization have set in. And that’s what protesters found on the roads outside Mr. Yoon’s official residence.

A mass of Mr. Yoon’s supporters were already there. They had hurried to his neighborhood after being jolted by the news Friday morning of the move afoot to detain him in connection with his martial law declaration last month. Other Yoon supporters had already been there for days, camped out on the pavement near his home in central Seoul, vowing to block any efforts to detain him.

Law enforcement officials retreated after trying for hours to work their way past Mr. Yoon’s supporters and running up against greater numbers of his personal security team. Their warrant to detain him for official questioning went unserved.

Thousands of anti-Yoon protesters rushed in to face off with thousands of pro-Yoon supporters. For his supporters, it was a moment of joy and defiance. For his detractors, one of bitter frustration.

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For decades, Syria was Iran’s closest Arab ally in the Middle East while the wealthy Persian Gulf monarchies were locked in a competition with Tehran for power and influence across the region.

With the sudden overthrow of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, his close ally Iran has been sidelined. That presents an opportunity for Gulf states to fill the void and develop ties with the new government in Damascus.

The two leading Gulf powers, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, are taking a cautious approach, because Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the main rebel faction that has seized control of much of Syria, leans toward Islamism and was once affiliated with the extremist group Al Qaeda.

The two Gulf nations have spent the better part of the past two decades trying to prevent the rise of groups that embrace political Islam across the Middle East, opposing the likes of Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Gulf powers have said publicly that the new leaders in Syria must demonstrate that they will be inclusive and tolerant of the country’s diverse array of sects before they can win political and financial support.

Anwar Gargash, a diplomatic adviser to the Emirati president, said recently that the nature of the rebel factions and their past affiliation with Al Qaeda were cause for concern.

“I think these are all indicators that are quite worrying,” Mr. Gargash said during a conference in the Emirati capital, Abu Dhabi, in mid-December shortly after the rebel takeover. “The region has seen episodes like this before, so we need to be on guard.”

The Gulf nations have long feared that the empowerment of Islamist groups in the Middle East could destabilize their own autocratic governments. When the Arab Spring erupted across the Middle East in 2011, several autocracies were toppled and powerful Islamist groups rose to fill the vacuum in countries, including Tunisia and Egypt.

“The U.A.E. has a long history of being particularly hostile to Islamist-affiliated political parties and governments,” said Anna Jacobs, a senior Gulf analyst for the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit. “But at least up until now, the U.A.E. has sent some very clear signals that it’s willing to work with the interim government for the sake of preserving stability in Syria and in the wider region.”

Concerns in the Gulf about Islamist power trace back to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York. Most of the 19 hijackers were Saudi and had been influenced by the kingdom’s strict version of Islam, Wahhabism, which has been blamed by some for fueling intolerance and terrorism. Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has since curbed the power of religious clerics.

After the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt, voters elected a president from the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood movement, Mohammed Morsi. But he was ousted in a coup in 2013 that the United Arab Emirates supported.

And the wariness toward Islamists in Syria is felt not only in the Gulf, but in other regional powers, including Egypt.

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the general who replaced Mr. Morsi in Egypt in 2013, has spent the years since then stamping out the Brotherhood in his country, seeing the group as a threat to his power.

In mid-December, Mr. el-Sisi made a rare appearance before journalists that suggested nervousness over the events in Syria. He appeared to draw a contrast between himself and Mr. al-Assad.

“There are two things I have never done, by the grace of God: My hands have never been stained with anyone’s blood, and I have never taken anything that wasn’t mine,” he said.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were staunch opponents of the Assad regime after Syria’s civil war began in 2011 and for the decade that followed. Mr. al-Assad became a pariah in the region and beyond for his brutal repression of opponents, which included the use of chemical weapons against his own people.

Both Gulf nations closed their embassies in Syria in early 2012 amid the Assad government’s crackdown on opponents. Over the years, as Mr. al-Assad regained control over much of his country with significant Russian and Iranian military support, there appeared to be a shift in Gulf attitudes.

The two Gulf powers were pivotal players in bringing Mr. al-Assad back into the Arab fold after a decade of isolation. The thaw was driven at the time by a desire for Arab unity to counterbalance Iran’s growing influence in Syria and in the wider Middle East.

After a devastating earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria in early 2023, the Saudi leadership made a humanitarian outreach to Mr. al-Assad. And in a milestone later that same year, the Syrian leader was readmitted to the Arab League.

The engagement with Mr. al-Assad’s administration was a tacit acknowledgment that, despite Western-backed efforts to oust him, his political survival had become a reality that could no longer be ignored.

The shift in Gulf attitudes while Mr. al-Assad still controlled Syria was part of a broader regional reordering as the Saudis and Emirates began to re-engage with Iran.

Under Syria’s new leaders, the economic opportunities of post-conflict rebuilding, an interest when Mr. al-Assad held sway, will be part of any assessment for the Gulf states.

With the country’s infrastructure in ruins, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates stand to profit from reconstruction efforts, provided they can negotiate favorable terms with the new government in Damascus.

Securing a role in rebuilding Syria also offers another way to influence the country’s future.

Qatar, in particular, seems open to supporting the transitional government in Syria.

Qatar maintained contacts with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and with other Islamist rebel factions in Syria during the civil war. In 2015, Qatar brokered a prisoner exchange deal between the rebels and the Lebanese Army.

When Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain severed ties with Qatar in 2017, one of their demands for restoring relations was that Qatar sever its support for the Nusra Front, the precursor to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.

At an Arab League summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 2023, Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, walked out of the meeting before a speech by Mr. al-Assad, signaling his country’s stance.

After the Assad ouster, Qatar sent its foreign minister to Damascus in late December, the highest-level government official from the Gulf to meet with the transitional government. It was followed earlier this week by a visit from the chief of the Gulf Cooperation Council and Kuwait’s foreign minister.

Ahmed al-Shara, the rebel leader who headed the offensive that overthrew Mr. al-Assad, said the Qataris would receive priority for their support over the past decade, possibly alluding to a role for the Gulf emirate in reconstruction projects.

The Qatari delegation was accompanied by a technical team from Qatar Airways to provide technical support for the reopening of Damascus International Airport.

“Qatar has a special priority in Syria because of its honorable stance toward the Syrian people,” Mr. al-Shara told reporters.

Rania Khaled and Vivian Yee contributed reporting from Cairo.

Syria’s new leaders met the French and German foreign ministers in the capital, Damascus, on Friday in one of the highest-level Western diplomatic visits since the fall of President Bashar al-Assad last month.

Annalena Baerbock of Germany and her French counterpart, Jean-Noël Barrot, arrived in Damascus for the first such trip in years on behalf on the European Union, as world powers have begun building ties with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist group that leads the new Syrian government.

Ms. Baerbock and Mr. Barrot met with Ahmad al-Shara, the group’s leader, after visiting the notorious Sednaya prison, where Mr. al-Assad’s regime had tortured and killed thousands of detainees.

“We are traveling to Damascus today to offer our support, but also with clear expectations of the new rulers,” Ms. Baerbock said in a statement before the meeting. “A new beginning can only happen if all Syrians, no matter their ethnicity and religion, are given a place in the political process.”

The visits are among a flurry of contacts between rebel leaders and Western officials looking to gradually open channels to the new Syrian authorities. Mr. al-Shara has worked to project a moderate image since taking power.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is still blacklisted as a terrorist group by the United States and the United Nations because of its past ties to Al Qaeda. Mr. al-Shara has called on the international community to remove that designation and sought to reassure minority groups, saying he wants to focus on rebuilding Syria after years of civil war.

“The current events demand the lifting of all sanctions on Syria,” he said in a televised interview last month.

Mr. Barrot said that France was urging the new rulers in Damascus to pursue a political transition that would allow “all the communities in Syria, in all their diversity, to be represented.” Part of that included reaching a “political solution” with the Kurdish minority, he said, which has carved out an autonomous region in northeastern Syria.

The diplomacy comes during a realignment across the Middle East, where Mr. al-Assad’s regime was a core part of Iran’s regional coalition. His family’s decades of iron-fisted rule were opposed by many Syrians, spurring the 2011 uprising and civil war. At least six foreign militaries were involved in the fighting, including those from Iran, Russia and Turkey.

Many countries — including the United States — have begun forging ties with the new government. In late December, Barbara Leaf, the senior State Department official for the Middle East, met with Mr. al-Shara in Damascus and told him that Washington would no longer pursue an outstanding bounty for his arrest.

Some Syrians — particularly Christians and other minority groups — are uncertain about Mr. al-Shara, pointing to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s conservative Islamist roots. In Idlib, a province controlled by the group since 2017, its leaders banned buying and selling alcohol and opened a chain of free religious schools. But Mr. al-Shara’s faction has eschewed the draconian decrees and brutal punishments of extremists like the Taliban and the Islamic State.

In a sign of the jitters among some Syrians, a posting on a Facebook page run by the Education Ministry this week described a new curriculum that was interpreted by some as taking a more Islamist slant.

It was not clear whether any of the changes had been implemented, but the minister of education, Nadhir Al-Qadri, issued a clarification saying that the curriculum was unchanged except for the removal of “content glorifying the Assad regime” and the addition of images of the Syrian revolutionary flag.

Officials in Hayat Tahrir al-Sham have laid out an ambitious plan for establishing a new government, and rebel leaders have assumed key positions to oversee a transition. They say they are establishing a caretaker government in consultation with Syrians of all backgrounds, as well as a committee to draft a new Syrian constitution.

Many in the region are also wary of the new Syrian government, including Gulf States like the United Arab Emirates, which has long tried to prevent the rise of groups that embrace political Islam, as well as Israel.

Overnight on Friday, Israeli warplanes bombed Syrian defense research sites near Aleppo, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitoring group. There were no immediate reports of casualties. Israel declined to comment on the report.

Israel has conducted hundreds of airstrikes against Syrian military sites since the fall of Mr. al-Assad in an effort to eliminate sophisticated arms like chemical weapons and long-range missiles. Mr. al-Shara has said he will uphold a longstanding cease-fire agreement with Israel, saying that Syria poses no threat to its neighbors.

Here are other developments in the region:

• Houthi missile attacks: The Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen launched a ballistic missile at Israel before dawn on Friday, setting off air-raid sirens across central Israel, including in Jerusalem. The Israeli military said it had intercepted the missile and there were no reports of serious casualties. Israeli fighter jets have flown over 1,000 miles to strike Houthi-controlled areas in Yemen but Israel has struggled to stop the attacks, which have escalated over the past month.

• Israeli strikes in Lebanon: The Israeli military said on Thursday night that it had bombed Hezbollah sites in southern Lebanon, while a 60-day truce largely continues to hold. Since the agreement went into effect in late November, Israel has repeatedly bombarded what it says are Hezbollah fighters violating the agreement. Hezbollah has generally refrained from responding militarily. The current cease-fire is set to expire in late January, although the United States and its allies hope it becomes permanent.

• Gaza war: Despite tentative optimism for a cease-fire in Gaza last month amid last-minute efforts by the Biden administration to reach a deal, the war has persisted. On Friday, the Israeli military said that over the past day it had struck roughly 40 targets in Gaza, which it said were affiliated with Hamas.

Hundreds of people were forced to flee a fire that broke out in an eight-story commercial building south of Seoul Friday afternoon, with video footage showing several people trapped on the roof waiting to be rescued.

Fire officials received reports of the fire around 4:40 p.m. in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, and were at the scene within an hour, fire officials said. About 300 people were said to be in the building at the time of the blaze.

Responders said they had rescued 240 and another 70 people had evacuated from the building on their own. There were no deaths reported, but almost 30 people were hospitalized for minor injuries including smoke inhalation.

Footage from a local news channel shows the lower stories of the building engulfed in flames. Black smoke spewed upward from the windows and people gathered on the building’s roof awaiting rescue.

The officials said the fire broke on the first floor but have not yet revealed an official cause. The building has five underground stories.