The rehabilitation of the Syrian regime goes through the United Arab Emirates. Friday, March 18, President Bashar Al Assad was received to everyone’s surprise by the Crown Prince and de facto leader of the country Mohammed Ben Zayed (known as “MBZ”), in Abu Dhabi.
The master of Damascus, who leaves his country only to go to Tehran or Moscow, has offered himself his first visit to an Arab country since the start of the uprising in Syria, eleven years ago almost to the day, the March 15, 2011. An unhappy concomitance for an opposition reduced to marking this anniversary in silence.
“Two brotherly countries”
Ignoring the international banishment of the Syrian regime, the two men displayed a real closeness by multiplying gestures and declarations on the “fraternal relations” between their two countries. According to the official Emirati agency Wam, MBZ and Assad spoke “cooperation and coordination between the two brotherly countries” in view of “contribute to security, stability and peace in the Arab world and the Middle East”.
Damas for his part affirmed that MBZ had spoken of a “Emirati position consistent in its support for the territorial integrity of Syria and its stability”. Bashar Al Assad was also received by Mohammed Ben Rachid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, the country’s other major emirate, where his older sister Bouchra Al Assad and her five children have lived for several years.
→ REPORT. Syria: the slow rebirth of Aleppo, martyred
This rapprochement between the Emirates and Syria is not new. Abu Dhabi has established itself in recent years as one of the most vocal advocates of the normalization of Syria and its reintegration into the Arab League, which had excluded it at the end of 2011, at the request of member countries. , including… the Emirates.
Since then, Abu Dhabi has reopened its embassy in Damascus at the end of 2018 and, in November 2021, its head of diplomacy Abdallah Bin Zayed Al Nahyan met Bashar Al Assad in Damascus. The Emirates, hostile to democratic protests in the Arab world, are also a potential ally in the costly reconstruction of the country ravaged by a decade of war.
Ambiguous neutrality in Ukraine
This visit marks an additional step towards normalization between Damascus and certain Arab countries which, apart from Qatar, would be less and less opposed to a return of Syria to the Arab diplomatic scene. But this positioning is far from being to the liking of the historical Western partners of the petromonarchy.
Washington, which already notes differences with Abu Dhabi on the Yemeni file, did not hide its annoyance. The head of American diplomacy, Antony Blinken, has canceled a tour of the Gulf, which was to take him to Saudi Arabia and the Emirates.
The United States is “Deeply disappointed and disturbed by this apparent attempt to legitimize Bashar Al Assad, said the State Department spokesperson. We urge all states contemplating a rapprochement with the Assad regime to reflect carefully on the atrocities committed by that regime against Syrians over the past decade. »
Since 2011, the repression of the anti-Assad uprising which turned into war, left half a million dead, millions displaced and devastated a large part of the country, today two-thirds controlled by Damascus.
Syria is not the only issue on which the Emirates are empowering themselves. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Abu Dhabi has been tackling and defending an ambiguous “neutrality”. Despite pressure from the United States, which remains its main partner but is increasingly looking to Asia, the Emirates have not rallied the anti-Putin front. The country refrained from condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 25 at the Security Council, which it chairs throughout the month of March.