This Friday was to be the day Bashar al-Assad made his debut in Saudi Arabia, as Syria rejoined the Arab League after a dozen years. But the Syrian president did not count on his Ukrainian counterpart to steal the limelight from him. Zelensky has landed by surprise in Jeddah and has announced that, at the invitation of Prince Mohamed bin Salman, he would speak at the summit "to improve Ukraine's ties with the Arab world."
This is Zelensky's first official visit to the Middle East since the invasion of his country. The Arab countries maintain, like Turkey, a neutral position in the conflict. Although some of them, like the United Arab Emirates - whose president, Mohamed bin Zayed, has today delegated his participation to one of his brothers - are doing more business than ever with Moscow, while welcoming thousands of Russian citizens.
A separate case is Syria, the great protégé in the Kremlin region. Russia also has among its best arms clients Algeria or Egypt. Like Beijing - key in the thaw between Saudi Arabia and Iran - Moscow can afford to talk to absolutely every country in the region, including Israel.
Previously, it was also announced that the Ukrainian leader was going to travel to the city of Hiroshima to attend the G7 summit that opened today in that Japanese city.
Before the Zelensky uproar, attention was focused on El Asad. The Syrian head of state has been rubbing shoulders since Friday with his Arab counterparts at the summit of Jeddah, a Saudi city on the Red Sea at whose airport he landed yesterday. Syria's readmission to the Arab League was agreed two weeks ago in Cairo, twelve years after it was expelled.
The ostracism of Kremlin ally Assad has been long and painful and would not have been possible without a prior thaw between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which resumed diplomatic relations this spring. The welcome to the Syrian president is an acknowledgment that he has emerged victorious from the armed assault against his regime, sponsored by many of the regimes that will shake his hand today. The suspension of Syria originated from the crushing of the so-called "Arab Spring" in its territory, with violence that facilitated the jihadist mobilization.
The reincorporation of Bashar al-Assad into the Arab concert is done against the will of the United States and, obviously, of Israel, which continues to periodically bomb arsenals and military facilities linked to Iran on Syrian territory. In fact, last week a bill was introduced in Washington to prohibit recognition of the Damascus government or the lifting of sanctions against it.
Shading Bashar al-Assad, whose government has consistently sided against Ukraine at the United Nations, can only be a source of satisfaction for Zelensky. Reducing the prominence of the readmission of Syria - which is actually the admission of defeat - also represents a relief for the regimes of the Arabian peninsula, especially for Qatar, the least conciliatory with Damascus.
The latter have made it difficult to rebuild the country, which also continues to be fractured. Half of the province of Idlib, the last jihadist stronghold, with the presence of Turkish forts, has been added to the Golan plateau, militarily occupied by Israel since 1967. Turkey also controls Afrin and a large swath of the north, to prevent the consolidation of a Kurdish parastatal entity along its border, controlled by the Kurdistan Workers' Party, of Kurdish-Turkish parentage.
This entity has the direct military support of the US, with around a thousand soldiers and perhaps a thousand more mercenaries, and the sympathy of Turkey's other NATO partners. It also houses 80% of Syria's oil reserves.
The pan-Arab embrace aims to reduce the dependence of the Syrian Arab Republic on Russia and especially Iran. Nor does it look kindly on the support of foreign powers for Kurdish secessionism in Syria or Iraq. And above all, he wants to put his weight behind Damascus to facilitate negotiations leading to an orderly evacuation of Turkish troops. A possibility accentuated by the weariness of a part of Turkish public opinion with the presence of 3.5 million Syrian refugees. The most enthusiastic supporter of his ouster is the opposition leader and presidential candidate, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu.
The last time Bashar al-Assad set foot on the pan-Arab summit was in 2010 in Sirte, Libya. The images of that appointment from the past decade seem to belong to another century. Silvio Berlusconi, as a special guest, kissed Muammar Gadhafi's hand and asked his friends in Israel to return the Golan to Syria. In the most famous photo, Gaddafi is seen sharing smiles with the Egyptian Hosni Mubarak, the Tunisian Ben Ali and the Yemeni Ali Abdallah Saleh. A year later, they would all be swept away by the Arab Spring and today they are all dead, Gaddafi being the one who had the worst death.
Throughout the past decade, Syria and Libya would be torn apart by civil wars in which there was no lack of international support and from which they have not yet recovered. But the surviving Bashar al-Assad is still in the limelight and the only thing his former regional adversaries aspire to is for him to open the doors to the return and political participation of the rebels, after handing over their weapons.
(Video of a long-awaited kiss between Bashar el Assad and his host, Saudi Prince Mohamed bin Salman, in Jeddah)
