Gulf rapprochement with the Assad regime and the politics of absurdity

As the Syrian civil war meanders to an end, with the Assad regime firmly in place, Arab states, most of whom fiercely opposed the Assad regime, are rearranging their relations with the regime to ‘limit’ Iranian influence in the country. The irony is that Syria and the Assad regime has allowed its territory to become a staging ground for Iranian influence in the Middle East - the very thing the Saudi-led bloc is trying to deter. 

UAE and Bahrain recently announced opening up their respective diplomatic missions in Damascus, the war-ravaged country’s capital. While Gulf countries have supported and armed Syrian opposition against the Assad regime during the civil war, Iran and Russia have heavily backed the regime, militarily and politically. 

The diplomatic moves come hot on the heels of the US announcement to withdraw military personnel from northern Syria where Washington backs the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a militia alliance led by the PKK-linked YPG, in the fight against Daesh. 

After Ankara threatened to take over YPG-led territories across its border, Washington decided to pull out its troops from the country, leaving Syria predominantly under Russian domination. Moscow intervened in the Syrian conflict on the side of the Assad regime in 2015, shifting the political and military odds heavily in favour of the regime. 

The US withdrawal might also mean the last nail in the coffin for the highly disorganised Syrian opposition which has lost most of its support, except Turkey and Qatar, across the Middle East. On the contrary, Assad’s forces have further been bolstered by Iranian-backed Shia militias. 

Sensing that the end of the civil war is close, and there is nothing to suggest that the Assad regime is going anywhere, the Gulf is rebuilding bridges with Syria going back to the old narrative that the country is an Arab country as Assad himself is an Arab. 

The UAE publicly declared that the Gulf’s recent rapprochement toward the Assad regime is an attempt to prevent non-Arab countries from intervening in “Arab, Syrian affairs,” meaning mainly Iran.  

The UAE concluded that “the next stage requires the Arab presence and communication in the Syrian file," wrote Anwar Gargash, the country’s foreign minister, on Twitter.

Indeed, in October, Bashar al Assad, speaking to a Kuwaiti newspaper, already indicated that Damascus had reached a “major understanding” with Arab countries.

Substantial sources also point out that Syria will possibly receive an invitation from the Arab League, which expelled Damascus in late 2011 at the beginning of the civil war, to rejoin with the union. 

Limiting Iran in Syria?

But it’s not clear that how much the Gulf’s renewed Arab presence can change Damascus’s relationship with Iran, which has long been allied with Syria since the early 1980s on various fronts. 

During the brutal and long Iraq-Iran War in the 1980s, Syria was the only Arab country, supporting Tehran against Baghdad, a prominent Arab capital. The Assad family, belonging to Syria’s Alawite community, which is sometimes considered part of Shia Islam, also maintains strong links with Iran, a Shia majority country. 

During the civil war, without Iranian-backed Shia militias, primarily Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and in the absence of Russian-Iranian cooperation, the Assad regime would not have been able to survive, according to many experts. 

The Gulf’s decision to reestablish ties with the Assad regime also appears to be another contradictory policy of the Gulf, which has reportedly been developing relations with Israel, the traditional enemy of Syria and the Arab world. 

The same Gulf, which is now ready to shake hands with the Assad regime, contrived a blockade against its neighbour, Qatar, last year because the country is too close to Iran. Now those same Gulf countries are establishing ties with one of Iran’s strongest allies. 

The Gulf countries might be seeking a new political alignment in which both Russia, Iran’s regional ally, and the US, currently Tehran’s enemy under Trump administration, can force Iran out of Syria. But there are no signs yet that Tehran would abide by such a scenario - especially after they helped to prop up the Syrian regime when it was on the brink of collapsing.