Syrian President Bashar Assad arrived in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia yesterday to attend his first Arab League summit in 13 years, signaling regional reintegration after more than a decade of war.
The scene of Assad’s plane landing in Saudi Arabia to a gracious greeting by top officials was unheard of just a year ago, when Riyadh, Doha, and several other Arab capitals severed diplomatic ties with Damascus and helped finance and arm opposition groups to topple him.
After 12 years of a deadly civil war that killed more than 500,000, wounded hundreds of thousands more, and left millions as refugees and displaced, Syrians at home and abroad seem ambivalent about the Arab states’ re-acceptance of Assad.
Assad arrived in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia last week to attend the Arab League Summit at the official invitation of Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz. This invitation, which ushers in the end of Assad’s extended diplomatic isolation, can be seen as a failure of his opponents to remove him over the course of the civil war and a victory in legitimacy for Assad.
The move sparked controversy and massive reactions among Syrians. Washington, however, said it did “not believe that Syria merits readmission to the Arab League”.
“We are not going to normalise relations with the Assad regime, and we certainly don’t support others doing that as well,” State Department spokesman Vedant Patel recently told reporters in Washington.
Some Syrians expressed their anger at Assad’s invitation, contending that his attendance at the league summit amounts to the legitimising of a “killer regime,” ending the international isolation of the brutal dictator responsible for millions of dead and displaced.