A delegation of top Arab parliamentarians met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus on Sunday to bring his country back into the fold of the Arab world.
The heads of the Iraqi, Jordanian, Palestinian, Libyan, Egyptian and Emirati houses of representatives, as well as representatives from Oman and Lebanon, traveled to Syria as part of a delegation from the Arab Inter-Parliamentary Union, Reuters reported.
The visit, which is another sign of thawing ties, follows a mini-summit in Baghdad that affirmed the Arab League’s intentions of having Syria return to the organization more than a decade after a devastating war broke out which killed over 300,000 people and displaced half the country’s population of 23 million.
First to arrive in Damascus was Egypt’s Parliament Speaker Hanafy al-Gebaly, the most senior Egyptian official to visit Syria in over a decade. Iraq’s Parliament Speaker Mohammed Halbousi — among several Arab leaders who have been calling for Syria’s return to the Arab League — headed the delegation.
Gebaly told reporters in Damascus that the Arab delegation was “visiting brotherly Syria to support the Syrian people” after the quake. He cited the joint statement from the Baghdad meeting about the need to begin the process of “bringing Syria back to the Arab fold.”
“We cannot do without Syria and Syria cannot do without its Arab environment, which we hope it can return to,” said Halbousi, according to AP.
Syria was largely isolated from the rest of the Arab world after the Arab League suspended its membership in 2011 and many Arab countries pulled their envoys out of Damascus.
But Assad has benefited from an outpouring of support from Arab states following the devastating earthquake on Feb. 6, which killed more than 5,900 people across his country.
Donors have included Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which both supported militants and terrorists seeking to overthrow Assad in the early years of the Syrian conflict.
Egypt’s President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi spoke with Assad by phone for the first time on Feb. 7 and Jordan’s foreign minister made his first trip to Damascus on Feb. 15.
Assad then traveled to Oman on Feb. 20 – the first time he left Syria since the quake. His 2022 visit to the UAE was his first trip to an Arab state since the 2011 outbreak of war.