Limited Normalization.. Why is the UAE trying to return Assad to the Arab League?

After a boycott of nearly ten years, the visit of the UAE Foreign Minister, "Abdullah bin Zayed" to the Syrian capital, Damascus, constituted an important shift in the process of rapprochement of Arab countries with the Syrian regime. The visit seemed "routine", as bin Zayed discussed with the President of the Syrian regime, "Bashar al-Assad", ways to develop bilateral cooperation in various fields, and he did not forget Assad, who has rarely enjoyed Arab rapprochement and recognition of this kind since his bloody campaign against the rebels more than a year ago. He held, to thank the UAE for its support "in overcoming the Syrian challenges imposed by the war", as the visit and Damascus are in dire need to strengthen relations with the oil-rich Gulf states, especially as their economy is suffocated by Western sanctions and the Arab boycott.

However, the visit that broke Assad’s isolation in the Arab world was not surprising. Al-Assad had previously received a direct call on March 27 from the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, “Mohammed bin Zayed,” and it was the first direct contact between an Arab leader and the head of the Syrian regime since 2011. Also, Over the past years, the UAE has topped the list of countries that have made initiatives to contain Damascus, as Abu Dhabi seems to see that the time has come to bring Syria and its regime out of their isolation.

Abu Dhabi and normalization with Assad

The organized Arab diplomatic boycott of the Assad regime began in the same year of the revolution, 2011, when Syria was expelled from the Arab League, while the member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council issued a joint statement condemning the violent repression and calling on Assad to end the bloodshed, as these countries did during the early years of the civil war To take more steps to isolate Assad diplomatically, the UAE closed its embassy in Damascus in 2013, like the rest of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries.

However, after a decade of this war, Assad emerged steadfast thanks to the military support of the Russians and Iranians, who confined the opposition to an enclave in northwest Syria, while the country was divided between an area under the control of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the east, and another high northern strip controlled by Turkey. and its allies, while the regime is now imposing its control over most of the lands. This situation has prompted a number of countries recently to change their position and normalize relations with the Syrian regime. Former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir visited the Syrian capital several days before his ouster in 2019, and Jordan, Syria's neighbor, also emerged in the course of this normalization, where Assad made his call. The first was the King of Jordan last September, after the two countries reopened the main border crossing between them.

Then the Gulf states appeared on the map of normalization with the Syrian regime, as Bahrain reopened its embassy in Damascus in 2019, and Oman joined it a year later, while Riyadh took decisions of rapprochement from a distance, where the head of Saudi intelligence, Major General Khaled Al-Humaidan, met his counterpart in Damascus, as well as Bashar Al-Assad last May, while Syrian Tourism Minister Rami Martini headed a Syrian delegation to Riyadh to attend the meeting of the Middle East Committee of the World Tourism Organization last March.

Syrian Tourism Minister Rami Martini Riyadh arrived at the

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Syrian Tourism Minister Rami Martini arrived to Riyadh to participate in the 47th meeting of the World Tourism Organization Committee for the ME pic.twitter.com/miyrtperu4

— Ayman Abdel Nour (@aabnour) May 25, 2021

Meanwhile, Abu Dhabi has strengthened its diplomatic, political and economic interaction with the Syrian regime, starting with reopening its embassy in Damascus in 2018 for the first time since the outbreak of the revolution. Anwar Gargash, then UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, said that the decision to return “to work The politician and diplomat in Damascus came as a result of a careful reading of the developments, and that reactivating the Arab role was necessary because of the Iranian and Turkish encroachment on Syria. In late June, Syrian Airlines announced the resumption of its direct flights to Dubai, and Abu Dhabi rushed to provide aid to the regime’s areas during the height of the Corona pandemic, as the social and economic conditions deteriorated throughout Syria due to “Covid-19”.

With regard to trade and economic exchange, we can point out that the UAE, the second largest Arab investor in Syria before 2011 with a total investment of $20 billion, is interested in economic and commercial gains from communicating with Assad, as Emirati investors are now attracted to the profits that can be achieved through reconstruction. After the civil war ends.

On the tenth of last October, the UAE Ministry of Economy said that it had agreed with Syria on future plans to enhance economic cooperation. According to Emirati sources, the value of non-oil trade between the two countries in the first half of 2021 amounted to one billion dirhams ($272 million).

Return considerations in Damascus

For the Syrian regime, the Gulf states’ support for various opposition groups and their insistence on bringing down Assad formed the main gap between the two sides at the height of the Syrian war, as the Gulf Cooperation Council states supported US allies such as the Free Syrian Army with weapons and money to varying degrees. But in the past two years, the Gulf has turned towards re-dealing with the Assad regime for several motives, the first of which is the growing conviction that the war in Syria has ended in Assad’s favour, and that there is a need to integrate Syria as much as possible into its Arab surroundings to avoid the existence of a failed state that may cast a shadow of instability on its neighbourhood. In the near future, as well as an attempt to compete and encircle the growing Iranian role in Syria, which lacks many economic and commercial tools owned in abundance by the Gulf states.

For Abu Dhabi, the beginnings of this shift towards cooperation with Assad go back to the common ground created by military cooperation with the Russians who have been militarily present in Syria since 2015. The UAE saw that the Syrian arena has become a region in which the influence of Iran and Turkey is increasing at the expense of the Arabs, and that accepting Assad and what is It allows him to open the door to understanding with Russia, and to conclude a Russian-Gulf agreement to redirect the Assad regime's compass away from both the Iranians and the Turks, which may be a good way out that achieves the maximum possible Gulf goals.

Moreover, Abu Dhabi’s firm position in the various Islamic currents motivated it to distance itself from supporting most of the Syrian Islamic opposition groups, as the UAE’s regional policy today is based mainly on confronting all the currents affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the region, While Saudi policy remains focused mainly on confronting Iran geopolitically and limiting its expansion, and thus the card of exploiting the influence of some Sunni Islamic groups in confronting Iran remains present in Riyadh’s mind, unlike Abu Dhabi, whose movements are of course not losing sight of Turkish influence, despite the recent economic openness Between the two countries following bin Zayed's visit to Ankara.

As a result of these calculations, the UAE has the most urgent motives for restoring the relationship with the Syrian regime, motives that are not shared by the rest of the Gulf countries to the same extent, as Saudi Arabia remains immune to the scenario of restoring relations with Assad, and the process of reforming relations between Ankara and Riyadh recently seems more serious and comprehensive on the The political level, where the Kingdom shows less concern about Turkish influence in Syria, and in the end, like many Western countries, cannot ignore the strategic weight that Ankara can represent in attempts to create a balance with Iran.

On the other hand, Qatar's position on resuming relations with al-Assad remains unchanged. Although Doha has gradually reduced its support for the Syrian opposition, it remains hostile to the regime, as revealed by the aftermath of the UAE Foreign Minister's visit to Damascus, where Qatar called for halting the normalization of relations with Syria. The Foreign Minister said Qatari Sheikh "Mohammed bin Abdul Rahman Al Thani", during a joint press conference in Washington with his American counterpart, "Anthony Blinken", that "Qatar's position will remain the same, and we believe that changing the position is not a viable option."

Did American silence encourage rapprochement with Assad?

In the first official US reaction to Abdullah bin Zayed's visit to Damascus, US State Department spokesman Ned Price called on Middle Eastern countries to "consider carefully the atrocities committed by the Assad regime against the Syrian people over the past decade, as well as its continued efforts to deprive the Syrian people of Most of Syria has access to humanitarian aid and security,” expressing an explicit American rejection of efforts to normalize and rehabilitate the Syrian regime.

But despite the repetition of such American statements, Washington’s position was limited to these limited statements and messages whenever an Arab country took a step towards normalizing relations with the Syrian regime, without taking any additional steps to stop this trend, and therefore it seems that the United States does not intend to follow firm policies To consolidate Assad's isolation regionally and internationally at the present time.

It can be said that Washington, which intervened in the Syrian civil war with the support of armed opposition groups, did not make good use of its presence on Syrian soil, and that the only file in which it succeeded in establishing a foothold was the file of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), when it provided weapons to the Kurds and directed its efforts to fight ISIS. In Syria, a position that does not put it in fundamental conflict with Assad and Russia behind him, but rather enables it to reach with Moscow through bilateral international understandings to a final solution, while this position necessarily puts it in great contradiction with Turkey, which rejects the “SDF” because of its links with the Workers’ Party Kurdistan, which Ankara classifies as a terrorist organization.

In other words, despite the fact that its official position on the Syrian regime has not changed, Washington's appetite for imposing isolation on Damascus appears to have diminished, as it has clearly retracted the use of military means or economic sanctions against Assad, and this was clearly demonstrated when Washington tacitly agreed to build a gas pipeline New to Lebanon with the aim of alleviating the acute shortage of fuel, as the agreement stipulated that this line would pass through Syria, which means excluding the decision from the sanctions regime imposed by Washington on Assad.

Nevertheless, the path of normalizing countries with Assad will be fraught with peril because of the 2019 Caesar Act, which authorizes the US Treasury to impose sanctions on anyone who does business with the Assad regime. It is expected that this law will curb the desire of Gulf countries and others to move towards economic normalization, as the law prohibits certain types of economic relations, and targets foreigners who provide “important construction or engineering services to the Syrian government” or “important financial, material or technological support” or are involved in In deals with the Syrian government or foreign elements in Syria that support the war efforts of the Assad regime.

The situation remains contingent, at least for the economically heavy countries and allies of Washington, such as the Gulf states, on the possibility of repealing the law if Washington and Moscow reach a solution and settlement in Syria. However, this does not seem clear on the horizon, especially with the United States preoccupied with confronting China and its gradual withdrawal. from Middle East.

This is not evidenced by Washington's absence from the discussions led by Moscow over the drafting of a Syrian constitution today.

The lion of tomorrow will not be the lion of yesterday

“We hope to return to the normal situation, and we want to sell in these markets, and that is why we are here to sell to the world from Dubai,” said a Syrian sales representative, standing dazzled at his country’s pavilion at the Dubai Expo 2020. In front of an advertising photo of Assad and his wife Asma, looking on To each other, the man expressed the hopes of the Syrian regime and its supporters after 10 years of war.

As for what the Syrians and the voices supporting them want for a political settlement that excludes Assad, who just won a fourth presidential term last May, the evidence tells us that it is far from being achieved. Al-Assad has seized power while he is at his weakest, so we do not expect him to give up today, or to make concessions on issues such as prisoners and the safe return of refugees, which are most likely international conditions that will be associated with any possible settlement.

In the end, it will not be easy to reach any close settlement that can achieve the economic goals of the countries seeking to rapprochement with Assad and invest inside Syria, not only because of the Western rejection of Assad’s stay, but because the rooted Iranian influence on the ground with his fighters and interests will not go away easily, especially It is linked to an existing influence that extends from southern Lebanon to southern Iraq.

Given that encircling Iran's influence in Syria is an important goal for both Washington and Riyadh, opening up to Assad with what he may carry from "Iranian" conditions remains difficult.

In the end, it seems that the resumption of Gulf relations with Syria will not go beyond diplomatic lines that can still be described as symbolic and limited, while there are still heavier files present that impede a real political and economic transformation, most notably the existing US sanctions and the absence of an international settlement, And the constant Iranian presence, as well as the bloody legacy of ten years of war.