Syria Rejoins the Arab League, But with Conditions Attached

At the Arab League Summit, which opened in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on May 19, it was expected that the two issues the League’s members would undoubtedly address were Syria and “Palestine.” Damascus is likely to be treated most favorably, as all but three of the 22 Arab states are ready to welcome Syria back as a member of the League, provided it meets certain conditions, while the Palestinians are likely to be disappointed by the Arab states’ continuing refusal to back them financially. More on this event can be found here: “Palestine’s fate, Syria’s return: Key topics at Arab League summit,” by Daoud Kuttab, Media Line, May 19, 2023:

Syria and Palestine are likely to be the two significant issues for discussion and decision-making at the Arab League Summit that opens Friday in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Many Arab leaders are expected to participate, including, potentially, the de facto ruler of Sudan Gen. Abdel Fattah Burhan, who is currently fighting for control of the country in an armed civil conflict.

Syria will be present at the summit after a decade of absence [and Bashar al-Assad did come in person to the Arab League Summit in Jeddah]. The Arab opposition to Syria has weakened in the past months, with only Qatar, Kuwait, and Morocco continuing to oppose Syria’s reintroduction into the Arab League. Qatar’s opposition mostly stems from an attempt to curry favor with the US. Kuwait’s opposition has to do with internal politics while Morocco’s is due to Syria’s support of a separatist movement in Western Sahara.

No Arab state appears to be concerned about Assad’s murderous war against most of his own people, a war that has caused more than half of the Syrian people to either leave the country, or to be internally displaced. Five million Syrians are now living in squalid camps abroad, mainly in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. Another six million are internally displaced and living as refugees in their own country, and nearly half a million Syrians have died in the eleven years of the civil war. But the Arab states care more about welcoming Syria back into the Arab fold, and taking it out of Iran’s orbit, than they do about human rights. Even the three Arab states that still oppose Syria’s reintegration into the Arab League do so for reasons of realpolitik, not out of any concern for human rights. Qatar opposes Syria again joining the Arab League, because it wants to please Washington, which continues to oppose the Assad regime and keeps sanctions on members of that regime in place. Kuwait has a significant domestic split between its Sunnis and its Shi’a on the subject of Syria, with the former still opposed to accepting Syria back in the Arab League while the country remains under the despotic rule of the minority Alawites (the Alawites belong to a branch of Shi’ism), the military caste that keeps Assad in power, by dealing savagely with the Sunnis who have constituted the main opposition to Alawite rule. And Morocco opposes Syrian membership in the Arab League not out of moral qualms, but because Damascus has supported the Sahrawi Liberation Front, whose members in the Western Sahara are fighting for independence from Morocco.

Syrian journalist Aghyad Abu Zaid told the Media Line that if Assad does attend the summit[he has] , it will likely mean that he has accepted the conditions that the other countries placed on his reentry to the Arab League. The other countries of the Arab League have insisted that Syria deal with the presence of foreign militias in the country and the proliferation of synthetic drugs produced there. They have also called on Syria to resolve its humanitarian crisis in line with UN Security Council Resolution 2254, which calls for an immediate cease-fire in Syria and a political transition.

The foreign militia that the Arab states most want expelled from Syria is Hezbollah, a proxy of non-Arab Iran. Despite the recent ballyhooed rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, there is still much mistrust of Iran in the Arab states, in the Gulf, in Egypt, and in the Maghreb. The Arabs want Iran’s main proxy to be out of Syria. Other military forces the Arabs would like to see withdrawn from Syria are the 20,000-30,000 Turkish troops still in Idlib Province, and 900 American troops still in southern Syria. Unlike its welcome of Hezbollah, the terror group that took an active role supporting the Syrian government in its civil war, Syria did not welcome, but had no way to prevent, the Turkish and American troops from entering the country and remaining as long as they wish. The Turks are there to keep Syrian Kurds from linking up with the Kurdish PKK in Turkey; the Americans are in southern Syria to hold ISIS in check.

An expert in pan-Arabism, Oraib Rantawi ,said that all indications suggest that the Syrian president will attend the summit [he has] and that some of those conditions might be flexible. “Syria will agree to engage with [Resolution] 2254 [UN Security Council Resolution 2254] about a “road map” for ending the conflict in Syria] but not totally implement it,” he told The Media Line.

Syria will likely commit to “engaging” with UNSC Resolution 2254, which will require bringing back the Syrians who fled abroad, and to return to their homes both those refugees and the Syrians who were internally displaced by the war. It is hard to see how Damascus can welcome back five million Syrians who, because they opposed the regime, fled abroad. And how does Damascus go about the hellishly difficult process of housing these people when so much of Syria, including their former dwellings, lie in ruins? And the same is true of the six million Syrians who are internally displaced, and now living in camps inside Syria, unable to return to their former homes because so many of these houses were destroyed in the civil war. Who will provide Syria with the money rebuild or repair many millions of homes, and how fast can this be accomplished?

He [Rantawi] also said that Syria will likely be unable to rein in the country’s drug trade. “At best they will reduce the trade,” he said. He noted that a recent Jordanian attack on a drug trafficker in Syria was likely done in coordination with Damascus.

It is unclear whether the summit will deal with the Syrian refugee crisis and its impact on the countries bordering Syria. Rantawi said that seriously addressing the refugee crisis would demand the passage of an amnesty law and exemption from mandatory military service for returning Syrian refugees. He also said that the international community would need to fund cash support for returning refugees for three years after their return to Syria….

Would Assad be willing, after 11 years of civil war, to provide amnesty for the eleven million Syrians — roughly, the five million who fled the country, and the six million who are internally displaced – so many of whom opposed, and continue to oppose, his rule? This may be a condition imposed on Assad by the Arab League if he wants any financial help in rebuilding his country. And Assad is desperate for such aid. It has been estimated that Syria will need $400 billion in order to restore the country to its antebellum condition. The only countries with that kind of money are the rich Arab states of the Gulf: Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Kuwait. Even if they should decide to help, they will not offer anything like what is needed – by the most generous estimates, they collectively might provide Syria with ten billion USD annually over a decade, but certainly not $400 billion.

And Assad will be asked by the Arab states to crack down on the drug trade that is now centered on his country, where drug laboratories produce the current drug of choice, captagon. The Syrian drug industry facilitates all stages of the production of the captagon pill and the smuggling process — which includes manufacturing the pills, hiding and packaging them in centers where grains are prepared for export, and finally, smuggling the pills through networks that sell them in foreign markets, especially in the rich Arab states of the Gulf, where there is a great appetite among the idle rich Arabs for drugs, especially captagon. In Syria, the drug trafficking operations are carried out by the Syrian Arab Army’s Fourth Division, directed by Maher al-Assad, the powerful brother of Bashar, with cover reportedly provided by Hezbollah.

Given the billions of dollars that the sale of captagon brings to Syria, and to such well-connected Syrians as Bahsar al-Assad’s brother, one wonders if Assad will really decide to crack down on the captagon producers and smugglers. He has to weigh the amount he could lose if he shut down the captagon trade, as against the amount of financial aid he might receive from the Gulf Arab states. Perhaps he will make a show of uncovering and seizing tens of millions of captagon pills, like the recent bust in Saudi Arabia, where 44 million captagon pills were seized in a single raid. That will give the appearance that Syria “is serious about curbing the drug trade.” But the Syrian government need not actually shut down that drug manufacturing and smuggling. Instead, it could simply move that captagon trade away from the Gulf, and while it continues to manufacture the pills, it will now promote their sale in other markets, flooding southern and western Europe with the pills, hoping to acquire a new clientele to make up for the markets lost in the Gulf oil states. The Gulf Arabs would have their demands met by Syria: Damascus will shut down the captagon trade its traffickers formerly conducted in the Gulf states, and will no longer make addicts of the rich young Arabs who are now captagon’s best customers. The Syrians will also get their wish: they will continue to manufacture billions of captagon pills annually (in 2021, 250 million pills were seized; with many times that number believed to have made it to their customers), and to smuggle them abroad, but now their final destination will not be Gulf Arabs, but the market of young Europeans — Infidels all –whose well-being of course is of no concern of the Arab League.