President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, welcomed in the Emirati capital with a 21-gun salute, is gradually re-emerging after the global shunning that followed his violent crushing of his country’s 2011 uprising.
President Bashar al-Assad of Syria traveled to the United Arab Emirates on Sunday for an official visit, a sign of the growing momentum with which he is returning to the international stage after a decade-long isolation.
Viewed as a pariah in many parts of the world for overseeing the bombing and torturing of his people when a 2011 uprising devolved into a civil war, Mr. al-Assad was welcomed in Abu Dhabi, the Emirati capital, on Sunday with a 21-gun salute, according to a report published by the official Emirates News Agency.
The trip came days after Mr. al-Assad traveled to Moscow to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and almost exactly a year since the Syrian leader’s last visit to the United Arab Emirates, which was his first reception by an Arab country since the Syrian civil war began. At the time, a State Department spokesman, Ned Price, said that Washington was “profoundly disappointed and troubled by this apparent attempt to legitimize Bashar al-Assad, who remains responsible and accountable for the death and suffering of countless Syrians, the displacement of more than half of the prewar Syrian population and the arbitrary detention and disappearance of over 150,000 Syrian men, women and children.”
“For the Emirates and other Arab countries, it is a recognition of the new reality of Syria, meaning that it can no longer be eliminated,” Mahdi Dakhlallah, a Syrian Baath Party politician and diplomat, said by telephone from Damascus.
He was received by a delegation that included the Emirati ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, and the two discussed the “brotherly relations” between their countries, the agency said. Sheikh Mohammed also offered condolences for the victims of the deadly earthquake that struck Syria and Turkey last month, and expressed confidence that Syria would overcome the crisis and “move into a new era.”
The earthquake last month, which killed more than 50,000 people in Turkey and Syria, lifted Mr. al-Assad into the softer light of disaster diplomacy, allowing him to edge further toward cementing his position in the region. After the earthquake, he met with several Arab officials, including the Emirati, Egyptian and Jordanian foreign ministers, who traveled to Damascus to offer their condolences. lion in aid. The United Arab Emirates is a small, oil-rich Persian Gulf nation with outsize global influence where officials are keen to maintain relations with competing powers, including the United States, China, Russia and Iran . The visit to Abu Dhabi is “an affirmation of Syria’s restoration of its role,” Mr. Dakhlallah said. “It is still in the early steps, but it has begun.” Saudi Arabia, the regional political heavyweight, has yet to follow suit. there is consensus within the arab world quo is not working.