Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s appearance at the Arab League summit on May 19 capped a monthslong effort to reintegrate the dictator, and his country, into the politics and economics of the Middle East. This process wasn’t encouraged by the United States, which continued to oppose Assad—but it wasn't exclusively the product of a decline in U.S. influence in the region relative to China and Russia, either. Instead, it’s been the result of a shift in priorities among countries in the region. Though some regional actors, primarily Qatar, object to mending ties with the regime, others, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), are shifting towards pragmatism after years of funding anti-Assad militias.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s appearance at the Arab League summit on May 19 capped a monthslong effort to reintegrate the dictator, and his country, into the politics and economics of the Middle East. This process wasn’t encouraged by the United States, which continued to oppose Assad—but it wasn’t exclusively the product of a decline in U.S. influence in the region relative to China and Russia, either. Instead, it’s been the result of a shift in priorities among countries in the region. Though some regional actors, primarily Qatar, object to mending ties with the regime, others, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), are shifting towards pragmatism after years of funding anti-Assad militias.
Some nations in the region, such as Oman and Iraq, never cut ties with the Assad regime. Of those who did, the UAE began its campaign for normalization back in 2018, when it reopened its embassy in Damascus, Syria’s capital. Jordan has also made its own efforts to work with Syria on border security, but the greater wealth and regional power of Saudi Arabia and the UAE confer proportionate influence on regional dynamics; the Saudi government in Riyadh invited Assad to the Arab League summit and may be pushing Cairo to normalize its own ties to Damascus, though there has been regional pushback on both fronts.
“At a time in which Arab states such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia are asserting their autonomy from Washington and diversifying their partnerships on the international stage, Abu Dhabi [UAE] and Riyadh’s relationships with Russia are increasingly important to the Emirati and Saudi leadership,” said Giorgio Cafiero, the CEO of Gulf State Analytics. “Normalizing relations with Syria serves to bring these [Gulf Cooperation Council] members closer to Moscow, but of course this is not their only motivation for warming up to Damascus.”
Indeed, rather than merely being the proxy battleground of a 21st-century Cold War with the United States on one side and Russia and China on the other, the Syrian regime is at the center of questions of regional stability and security, on a range of issues from the drug trade to managing relations with Iran.
Assad has been internationally isolated since the regime began ruthlessly cracking down on its domestic uprising during the Arab Spring; but its isolation became more pronounced in 2019, when the United States enacted the Caesar sanctions, which targeted individuals and entities doing business with the regime, including in the petroleum and natural gas industries. Syria’s economy was in deep distress by 2020, with an estimated 80 percent of people living in poverty and 40 percent unemployed, according to New York Times reporting. The effect of sanctions, a decade of war and a terrorist insurgency, and regional economic crisis had decimated Syria’s economy.
The spiraling economy and isolation made way for Syria’s illicit captagon trade and cemented the influence of Iran and Russia.
A 2022 report from the New Lines Institute on Jordan’s attempts to normalize relations with Syria detailed the challenges of those efforts, particularly in relation to the captagon trade. Though accurate details about captagon production and trade are difficult to determine, the drug likely brings in billions for the regime. Assad and his network, including many members of his family, control captagon production; then, smugglers take it through a variety of routes, including through Jordan, to markets in the Gulf countries.
“What the actual figure is is difficult to estimate, but I would say [what] the Assad regime gets to their own pockets is, I believe, no less than a billion dollars, while the market value of that industry could be over $10 billion,” Karam Shaar, an independent analyst on Syria’s politics and economy, said. “However you look at it, this actually exceeds Syria’s legal exports. That’s playing a pivotal role in the way countries in the region are looking at Syria and how to deal with it.”
The counterfeit captagon makes its way throughout the region. It travels primarily through Jordan and Lebanon, but Saudi Arabia reported the highest number of seizures from 2015 to 2019—in 2019, nearly 146 million tablets, compared to 23 million in Jordan, the next highest reported amount, according to a 2021 UN report. Though Arab nations may hope to control the illicit captagon trade through negotiations with Damascus and investing in a licit Syrian economy, there’s no reason to believe that the Assad regime is willing to give up what has become lucrative business, should widespread normalization be on the horizon.
Wealthy Gulf nations and the countries that rely on them may also try to blunt Iran’s influence over Syria and in the region, by mending ties with Damascus and working with Tehran. But, as Aron Lund, a fellow at Century International and Middle East analyst at the Swedish Defense Research Agency said, this isn’t the first time they’ve made such attempts.
“There were repeated attempts to ‘flip’ Syria, before the war, to move away from Iran and into the Saudi-led sphere,” Lund said in an interview. But the nations attempting that maneuver “were just frustrated, time and time again, and I think probably they realize at this point, first of all, that Assad is not going to budge on core issues like Iran. He needs Iran; he’s not going to step away from Iran. And he’s not going to be a reliable negotiator that delivers everything that he promises to do.”
Iran and Syria have made strange bedfellows for decades; though the hard-line Islamic Republic and the nominally secular Assad regime may superficially have little in common, they have long shared similar ideologies regarding Israel and the United States and both countries’ influence in the region overall. The Syrian civil war has shown the strength of that relationship and its importance to the survival of the Assad regime.
Iran provided Syria with military assistance against Israel in 1982, kicking off the longstanding interdependence between the two nations. Iran provided the Syrian regime with weapons, training, and other military assistance against Israel and, throughout the civil war, opposition forces. Meanwhile, Syria is a key transport route to get weapons and supplies to Hezbollah, the Iran-supported Shia militia based in southern Lebanon.
In 2006, the two countries signed a mutual defense pact, which at the time seemed little more than show; however, during the Syrian civil war, assistance from Iran and Russia has proven to be devastatingly useful to the Assad regime. Prior to the war, Iran also took advantage of Syria’s opening economy, investing billions in infrastructure and other projects there in 2007. Iran extended a $1 billion line of credit to Syria in 2015, and $3.6 billion in 2013 to buy goods such as fuel and consumer products, including food, Reuters reported.
Iran is again investing in Syria; the two nations signed multi-year agreements related to infrastructure and trade earlier this month. As one of the key factors keeping the Assad regime intact and in power over the past 12 years, Iran’s primacy of place in Syria is unlikely to change.
“Iran is deeply embedded,” Natasha Hall, a senior fellow with the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said. “They’re not going anywhere.”
Other countries might in the future see opportunities to make money rebuilding in Syria, after more than a decade of war as well as February’s devastating earthquakes in both Turkey and Syria, which reduced much of the country to rubble. The UAE in particular may see opportunities for construction projects.
Ultimately the political stability that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are seeking from Assad will come in the form of autocracy, which has now been cemented as the regional norm. Though leaders such as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi aren’t mass murderers like Assad, none of the countries seeking to renew ties with Syria are democracies. In a sense, welcoming Assad back into the fold marks, with grave and craven finality, the end of the Arab Spring.
But there are still countries in the region that have yet to welcome Assad. Qatar and Egypt, in particular, have their own specific and dynamic reasons for ambivalence toward Syria.
Qatar is the most significant—that is, the wealthiest—stumbling block to Syria’s regional reintegration. As Cafiero noted in a recent piece for the Stimson Center, Qatar certainly seems keen to preserve its relationship with the United States and the broader West, hence its position on Syria. But Qatar also vocally and practically supported anti-Assad forces. It’s also less likely to bow to pressure from Gulf powers after the UAE initiated a blockade against it in 2017; that crisis was resolved in 2021, but Qatar came out of it more closely aligned with the United States, Cafiero wrote. Still, pressure from Turkey and Iran could eventually push Qatar to accept reconciliation with Syria down the line.
As for Egypt, Sisi “doesn’t seem to have clearly defined objectives in seeking to normalize relations with Assad, but Cairo has been uncomfortable for some time with the idea of a regional regime being ostracized for authoritarian rule and committing brutalities,” Dareen Khalifa, senior Syria analyst at the International Crisis Group, wrote in an email. “That said, Sisi has been keen not to take unilateral steps toward Assad (which is part of his overall cautious foreign policy approach that aims to maintain a balancing act with all key regional and international actors).”
Egypt may also try to extract funding from its Saudi and Emirati benefactors in exchange for renewing relations with Assad; though Egyptian officials have met with their Syrian counterparts, there’s been no official announcement about what the outcome of those meetings will be.
The United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union have clearly stated that they’re not interested in a relationship with Damascus and won’t remove sanctions. But they’re not going to stop other countries from renewing ties either, diplomats in the MENA region have reported, even though there is as yet no plan to pursue an agreement ending the war.
For Assad, the normalization trend legitimizes his criminal, repressive rule, and although there are reportedly some expectations on the table for renewing ties—that the regime will stem the captagon flow, repatriate refugees, manage violence at the borders, and move away from Iran’s orbit—there are currently no milestones, no timeline, no metrics for success, and no enforcement mechanisms to ensure the regime makes any changes in its behavior toward either its neighbors or the Syrian people.
The Assads—both Bashar and his father Hafez, the previous president—have terrorized generations of Syrians, with no long-term consequences and no justice for murdered, tortured, and displaced people.
Under Hafez al-Assad, government forces killed as many as 40,000 people in the 1982 siege on the city of Hama; thousands of people were disappeared or held as political prisoners and tortured in the notorious Tadmor military prison. There has still been no fact-finding mission and no effort toward justice for the victims and their families. Under Bashar al-Assad, it’s estimated that half a million people have been killed and 6.9 million people displaced internally; approximately 14.6 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance; and in May alone, the Syrian Network for Human Rights recorded at least 226 arbitrary arrests, including of women and children.
With Arab countries taking a pragmatic approach and the rest of the world essentially turning its back, the chance of accountability and lasting peace for Syria’s people is as good as nonexistent. While some Syrians are hoping for a move—any move—to help stabilize the cratered economy and bring a peaceful resolution to the war, many see normalization as a betrayal unlikely to yield results.
“When we first protested in 2011, we didn’t ask permission from anyone, and we didn’t take into [consideration] the regional and international environment surrounding Syria,” Ibrahim Aboud, a displaced person from Maarat al-Numan city in Idlib province, told Al Jazeera in May. “We are determined to achieve the goals of the revolution and liberate Syria from the Assad regime and its thugs.”
Ellen Ioanes covers breaking and general assignment news as the weekend reporter at Vox. She has reported on U.S. politics and policy and foreign affairs since 2021, covering Russia’s war with Ukraine, U.S. congressional policy, and South Asian politics, among other issues. She previously worked at Business Insider covering the military and global conflict, and has bylines in the Guardian, Foreign Policy, the Center for Public Integrity, and others. She has a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. X: @girlstothefront
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