The rehabilitation of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad

The president of Syria is attending his first Arab League summit having been suspended from the organisation for the past 12 years.

Saudi Arabia invited Bashar al-Assad to the gathering after Arab states agreed to reinstate Syria’s full membership of the league.

However, the move is controversial, said The Guardian, coming as Western and Gulf states “clash” over Assad’s “rehabilitation after more than a decade of war against his own people”.

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What’s happening and why?

Syria’s membership of the Arab League was suspended in 2011 – “early on in the uprising-turned-conflict” that has “killed nearly a half million people since March 2011 and displaced half of the country's pre-war population of 23 million”, said NPR.

However, Assad has been readmitted after several of the Arab states that had backed opposition forces in Syria, including Saudi Arabia, accepted that the president’s grip on power was secure.

He “didn’t work his way back into the fold through meaningful concessions or reforms”, said Axios. “He’s still in power and back at the table due to a decade of determined brutality and shifting regional winds.”

“The rapprochement accelerated following the devastating earthquake that hit Turkey and north-western Syria in February,” said the BBC, “when once-hostile powers decided to send humanitarian aid to Syrian government-controlled areas.”

Arab League Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit said that he hoped that “Syria’s regaining of its seat is a precursor to the end of its conflict”.

What does it mean?

Assad’s return will “mainly be about symbolism”, said Al Jazeera. It came about because “the emerging consensus in Arab capitals today, rightly or wrongly, is that addressing Syria’s problems requires engagement with Damascus”.

Arab leaders “hope that by mitigating the conflict, they can begin to reverse the associated drug trafficking networks, refugee crises, weakened border security, and intensified role of Iranian forces and Tehran-backed militias in Syria”, analysts told the news site.

Who supports it?

Saudi Arabia championed Assad’s return to the 22-nation pan-Arab body, believing that the region’s leaders have to “accept pragmatically that Assad has survived the Syrian civil war”, said The Guardian. The “best way to influence the consequences of his victory is through an engagement with Damascus that will bear fruit over time”, said the paper.

Ultimately, said the Daily Beast, the development is “an undeniable political victory for the Islamic Republic of Iran – gained via military means – after backing Bashar al-Assad’s regime during the Syrian Civil War”.

Who doesn’t?

There are “objections” to the move in Washington and London, said The Guardian. Those governments believe the Syrian leader has “shown no contrition” for the millions who have been killed and displaced by his forces since pro-democracy protests started in 2011.

Joe Biden’s Syria policy has been “dealt its biggest blow yet” with the move, which has been described by Assad’s diplomats in New York as “bearing with it a message for the US to end its ongoing military presence and sanctions targeting the country”, said Newsweek.

Raphaël Glucksmann, a French member of the socialist alliance in the European parliament, also objected. “Crime pays, that’s the message that is being sent,” he said.

In a strongly worded attack, he added that al-Assad is “the worst criminal against humanity today” and “represents 500,000 dead, children gassed in Ghouta, Sednaya prison, places of death, slaughterhouses for human beings, rape set up as a system”.

Syria faces objections closer to home, too. Qatar, Kuwait and Morocco “have not renormalised relations with Damascus”, said Al Jazeera, and “still maintain that al-Assad’s government is illegitimate”.

“Qatar has positioned itself as the Arab World’s most hardline opponent of [al-]Assad’s regime,” Aron Lund, a fellow at Century International and a Middle East analyst, told Al Jazeera.

The nation’s foreign minister told a news conference in Doha that it had dropped its opposition only because it did not want to “deviate from the Arab consensus”.

What might happen next?

There could be consequences for refugees, according to the opposition in Syria. The “advent of normalisation” is already leading to reports that Syrian refugees in countries such as Lebanon are being “forcibly rounded up to be put on lorries to return to their home country”, said The Guardian.

Meanwhile, there are no signs that the White House is ready to moderate its stance. “Our position is clear – we are not going to normalise relations with the Assad regime, and we certainly don’t support others doing that as well,” state department spokesperson Vedant Patel told the media.