Bashar al-Assad is back: the Arab countries are sealing their rapprochement with Syria’s president with the country’s readmission to the Arab League. Since the devastating earthquakes in the Syrian-Turkish border region three months ago, Assad has increasingly pushed back into the Arab community. He cleverly used the catastrophe to promote a kind of rehabilitation of his government. The government publicly flaunted any contact with other countries.
Sunday’s decision, when ministers meet in central Cairo for several hours of deliberations, is a decisive success for the ruler. Critics may emphasize the regional organization’s minor relevance given internal conflicts, its limited influence and inability to find common ground on important foreign policy issues. For Assad, whose country and economy are groaning under sanctions in the domestic civil war, it now offers the most important political gain in years.
The decision is a bitter blow for many Syrians. Assad’s government is said to have tortured civilians and used poison gas against them in the civil war that arose out of brutally suppressed protests in 2011. More than 350,000 people died and millions were displaced. The Arab countries would completely give up all Syrians against whom crimes were committed, said the Syrian opposition leader Jahja Aridi of the German Press Agency. The opposition still wants to liberate the country from the “oppressive regime” in Damascus. However, together with allies, this now controls around 70 percent of the fragmented country.
A paradigm shift in Saudi Arabia, the leading nation in the Gulf and a heavyweight in the league, was now decisive for Assad’s rehabilitation in the region. Because of the brutal actions taken by the Syrian government against its own people, Riyadh played a key role in pushing for Syria’s exclusion from the organization at the time. As the war progressed, Assad slipped further and further into isolation. Direct talks with him were and are unthinkable in the West.
However, Saudi Arabia is currently in the process of freeing itself from regional conflicts and emancipating itself from its most important security guarantor, the USA. The crown prince and de facto ruler of the country, Mohammed bin Salman, now sees costly conflicts and security threats as obstacles to his ambitious plans to modernize the country and make it independent of oil. This includes, for example, the construction of a megacity on the Red Sea.
In March, the country already announced an end to the diplomatic ice age with its rival Iran, with which it is vying for power and influence in the region. The rapprochement of the two states also paved the way for normalization with Damascus. Saudi Arabia supported rebels at times in the Syrian civil war, while Iran is a close ally of the Assad government. Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud has long held out the prospect of rapprochement with Assad and has also traveled to Syria again himself.
According to observers, the Gulf countries are hoping in return for an intensified fight against the rampant drug trade in Syria. The civil war country produces amphetamines on a large scale, which also reach neighboring countries via smugglers. According to experts, however, the Assad government is deeply involved in the business itself, and the billions in revenue ensured its survival. The chances of a tough approach are therefore not really good.
“Assad has little to offer the Arabs apart from the probable reconstruction bill,” conclude Malik al-Abdeh and Lars Hauch from the US think tank Atlantic Council. The normalization with Syria is therefore above all a reaction of the Arab countries to a newly forming world order in which the West is fighting for supremacy against a bloc consisting of China, Russia and Iran. The Arab states, with their limited military resources, wanted to secure a place in this world and maintain their autonomy.
