The Washington Post Today's WorldView: Assad in Saudi Arabia reflects the Middle East’s new normal

Today's WorldView: Assad in Saudi Arabia reflects the Middle East’s new normal

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The Washington Post

Today's WorldView

 By Ishaan Tharoo   with Sammy Westfall

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Assad in Saudi Arabia reflects the Middle East’s new normal

Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi talks with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad ahead of the Arab League Summit in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, on Friday. (The Egyptian Presidency/Handout via Reuters)

Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi talks with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad ahead of the Arab League Summit in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, on Friday. (The Egyptian Presidency/Handout via Reuters)

The bleak optics were there for all to see. There was Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, grinning as he strode down the tarmac after landing in the Saudi city of Jiddah. There were the robed plenipotentiaries from the kingdom, including Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, greeting him in a warm embrace. There Assad sat in session with the leaders of other Arab states, welcomed back into the fold.

That was Friday for Assad, who experienced a rehabilitation arguably years in the making, but which was no less jarring for his critics and opponents. A decade ago, officials in the Gulf monarchies were conspiring on ways to oust Assad. They poured resources and arms into the civil war raging in Syria, backing a motley grouping of anti-Assad rebels. As Assad turned his guns on his own people, bombing Syrian cities and unleashing chemical weapons on civilians, they placed the regime in a deep freeze, casting it out of the Arab League, the brotherly bloc that has long accommodated demagogues and autocrats of various stripes.

 

But Assad is in de facto control of the majority of his country, while Syrian rebel forces and their supporters are subdued and scattered. The regional powers once invested in his removal have shifted their attention and priorities elsewhere. “The international community has failed us completely,” British Syrian activist Razan Saffour told my colleagues, reflecting on the Syrian regime’s return to the Arab League.

“Instead of holding Assad accountable for his heinous crimes … he is welcomed and even rewarded, as if the past 12 years of suffering and bloodshed never occurred,” Wafa Ali Mustafa, 32, a Syrian exile in Germany, told The Washington Post. She warned against the process of “normalization” of the Assad regime that seems well underway among its Arab neighbors.

Assad used his appearance in Jiddah to cast himself once more as a pillar of stability in a restive region. “It is important to leave internal affairs to the country’s people as they are best able to manage them,” he said at the gathering, reprising the abusive autocrat’s age-old refrain. Never mind that, under his watch, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have died, tens of thousands disappeared into regime prisons, and millions have been displaced while much of the war-ravaged country still needs humanitarian assistance. The devastating earthquake that hit southern Turkey and parts of northern Syria in February presented Assad a new path to accelerate rapprochement with sympathetic neighbors.

All the while, the Syrian dictator grinds his ideological ax. Assad launched a jab at neighboring Turkey, whose proxies represent some of the main holdouts to Damascus rule. Assad warned of the “danger of expansionist Ottoman thought” — making an implicit appeal both to Pan-Arab solidarity as well as an anti-Islamist pitch. Such rhetoric, to a certain extent, is the stock and trade of some of Assad’s counterparts in the Arab League. In the months preceding Assad’s arrival in Saudi Arabia, his regime made successful overtures to countries like Tunisia and Egypt, both of whose autocratic leaders consolidated their rules through anti-Islamist crackdowns.

For the Saudi hosts of the session, Assad returning to the fold is part of a broader attempt to ease frictions in the Middle East, after years of geopolitical polarization, ruinous wars and social unrest. The crown prince expressed hope Friday that Assad’s return to the Arab League “leads to the end of its crisis.”

What was on show, instead, was a reminder of the antipathies that fueled it: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky attended the summit in Jiddah as a pit stop on his way to the Group of Seven meeting in Japan. He called on Arab leaders to take “an honest look” at the war waged by Russia in his country, with its human rights abuses and violations of international law.

“Unfortunately there are some in the world, and here among you, who turn a blind eye to those cages and illegal annexations,” Zelensky said. In a room crowded with Kremlin friends and allies, Assad, whose regime was saved by a Russian intervention in 2015, was at the head of the pack.

Yet the war in Ukraine, and the wide-ranging disruptions to markets that it triggered, has focused minds in the Middle East on a need for greater stability in an age of uncertainty. Saudi Arabia is mending fences with longtime antagonist Iran and is seeking a way out of the war in Yemen, as it prioritizes its own ambitious plans for development at home. “Riyadh didn’t begin the normalization push with Assad’s regime, but it did run with it, and hard,” tweeted H.A. Hellyer, a senior fellow at the RUSI think tank in Britain, gesturing to overtures made to Syria earlier by countries like the United Arab Emirates. “That’s all part of Riyadh’s calculation that its domestic agenda requires de-escalation within the region on any other file, so that full attention is focused within.”

Hellyer offered a stark warning: “But Assad’s reintegration may come back to haunt Riyadh. Assad hasn’t changed, and his regime continues to be unstable, even with Russian and Iranian backing. There are millions of Syrians who view Assad as the most brutal in their history, and that isn’t a recipe for good times.”

U.S. officials and Western diplomats have looked on warily at the Syrian regime’s political rehabilitation. As countries like Jordan, Algeria and the United Arab Emirates call for an easing of sanctions on Syria, U.S. lawmakers are stepping up efforts to pass a new round of legislation punishing the Assad regime and warding against further normalization.

“The Americans are dismayed,” a Gulf source close to government circles told Reuters. “We (Gulf states) are people living in this region, we’re trying to solve our problems as much as we can with the tools available to us in our hands.”

The shift may also reflects a waning U.S. appetite for involvement in the region, as Washington casts its eyes to challenges further east and takes a more back seat role in Arab affairs. “The Biden administration perhaps has made a calculus that, ‘Okay, the region is moving forward with normalization,’” Mona Yacoubian, vice president of the Middle East and North Africa center at the U.S. Institute of Peace, said to Al Jazeera. “Perhaps the issue then is to get something for it, get concessions.'”

It’s unclear how important those concessions could be. Experts point to the spread of the illegal trade of captagon, a drug that has become a huge illicit export in Assad’s Syria and whose dangerous impact on the region may be a source of leverage for Damascus.

“In order to keep the region’s attention, it’s quite possible the regime will grant some minimal concessions in the coming months: drip-feeding intelligence on captagon movements; keeping cross-border aid access open; and perhaps granting a small prisoner amnesty,” Charles Lister, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, told me. “But it’s just not in Assad’s DNA to concede in any significant way, so there will come a time when this re-engagement reaches a natural blockage — where the next step, major economic investment, becomes diplomatically untenable or otherwise deterred by Western sanctions.”

For now, though, Syria’s normalization is proceeding apace. Arab nations “are accurately judging the U.S. position on normalization, which is the United States doesn’t want to have its fingerprints on it, doesn’t want to support it, but the United States is not going to do anything to prevent it from happening,” William F. Wechsler, a former Pentagon official who heads Middle East programs at the Atlantic Council, told my colleagues.

1,000 Words

Ukrainian forces have been reduced to small footholds in the devastated eastern city of Bakhmut, which despite its limited strategic importance has emerged as the war’s bloodiest battlefield, reports Today’s Worldview’s Adam Taylor from Ukraine, as well as Anastacia Galouchka. But they have made gains on the Russian flanks, in a move to encircle the city and extend the fight there, according to Ukrainian officials and military personnel in the field.

“I’m in the trenches. We’ve fortified ourselves in the positions” that Russia once held, Yuriy, a soldier in the Ukrainian army’s 5th Separate Assault Brigade, texted from a position south of Bakhmut.

“Around us are a lot of dead Russians,” he said. (Sergey Shestak/AFP/Getty Images)

Talking Points

• At the Group of Seven summit in Hiroshima, Japan over the weekend: The war in Ukraine and China’s growing economic influence was top of mind for world leaders, alongside other serious global challenges like climate change and international standards for artificial intelligence.

Visiting Hiroshima, decimated by an atomic bomb in 1945, Zelensky warned urgently that Ukraine’s cities could face a similar fate if the world does not help him rebuff Russia’s onslaught. Acknowledging that the city has largely been leveled, he said, “For today, Bakhmut is only in our hearts, and there is nothing on this place.”

And, my colleagues Tyler Pager and Matt Viser report on how, from start to finish, Biden’s Japan trip was buffeted by U.S. politics. At every turn, Biden faced questions — from reporters and other foreign leaders — about the debt limit crisis in Washington that threatens to upend the global economy.

• Police in Brazil indicted the former head and deputy head of the country’s Indigenous affairs agency for failing to take “necessary measures” to prevent the killings of a British journalist Dom Phillips and a Brazilian Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira in the Amazon rainforest last year.

•  My colleagues in Kherson, Ukraine report on the sprawling waterway, with Russian and Ukrainian forces posted on opposite banks, that serves as the war’s most immovable front, a barrier to transporting troops and supplies. But as Kyiv readies a highly anticipated counteroffensive, an attack on the river’s east bank might be the one place where the Russians could be caught by surprise, they report. 

 

G-7 priorities

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sits with the Group of Seven leaders during a session at the G-7 leaders summit in Hiroshima, Japan, on Sunday, May 21. (Japan Pool)

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sits with the Group of Seven leaders during a session at the G-7 leaders summit in Hiroshima, Japan, on Sunday, May 21. (Japan Pool)

HIROSHIMA, Japan — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky arrived here Saturday for a dramatic last-minute visit to the Group of Seven summit of powerful democracies as President Biden sought to mobilize allies against a rising China’s growing political, military and economic power.

Zelensky’s trip, which had become public only a day before, immediately overshadowed the leaders’ efforts to focus on issues beyond Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. But it underlined the summit’s broad theme of democracies standing up to autocracies, as Biden and his counterparts highlighted Moscow and Beijing as twin threats to a democratic world order.

In their joint statement, the G-7 nations — which comprise Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as the European Union — sought to project unity on a range of global challenges. It was clear that supporting Ukraine and countering what they called China’s economic coercion remained the top priorities, and leaders specifically called out China for not playing an active role in ending Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“We call on China to press Russia to stop its military aggression, and immediately, completely and unconditionally withdraw its troops from Ukraine,” the leaders wrote in the communiqué. “We encourage China to support a comprehensive, just and lasting peace based on territorial integrity and the principles and purposes of the U.N. Charter, including through its direct dialogue with Ukraine.”

The joint statement, which also said the countries seek to have “constructive and stable relations with China,” came on the second day of a summit that has been largely oriented around Ukraine and its fight against Russia.

Biden is likely to meet with Zelensky, who won a significant victory when White House officials on Saturday confirmed they were going to allow allied nations to send F-16s to Ukraine and the United States would train Ukrainian pilots to fly the Western fighter jets.

“We have delivered what we promised,” Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, told reporters. “We have given Ukraine what it needs based on close consultations between our military and theirs. And now, we have turned to discussions about improving the Ukrainian air force as part of our long term commitment to Ukraine’s self-defense.”

Sullivan described the training — which is a significant reversal for Biden, who earlier dismissed the need of the fighter jets — as a logical next phase in the war, after providing artillery, tanks, and other arms.

Before Zelensky’s arrival, the leaders spent much of the day focused on economic security, an all-but-explicit effort to push back on China’s economic influence. — Tyler Pager, Matt Viser, Michelle Ye Hee Lee and Meaghan Tobin

Read more: Zelensky makes dramatic G-7 visit as Biden mobilizes allies over China 

 

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