The Normalizing of Assad Has Been a Disaster

Syria’s president was welcomed back into the fold a year ago—and everything since then has gotten worse.

By Charles Lister, a senior fellow and director of the Syria and Counterterrorism and Extremism programs at the Middle East Institute.

Foreign Policy

One year ago, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was welcomed back into the Arab League with considerable fanfare, walking the purple carpet as he joined the summit being held in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The decision to readmit Syria to the Arab League after 12 years of isolation was taken amid a major regional push to reengage Assad’s regime, to normalize its diplomatic and security status, and to convince it to help resolve some of the most problematic effects of Syria’s long-running crisis. In his official remarks at the summit in May 2023, Assad celebrated what he called a “historic opportunity … for peace in our region, development and prosperity instead of war and destruction.”

Almost exactly a year later, on May 16 this year, Assad was back at the table alongside Arab League members at a summit in Manama, Bahrain. But this time, he was only permitted to attend on the condition that he stayed silent throughout. The reason? The Arab state effort to bring Assad in from the cold and make his regime a responsible actor had completely backfired. Not only had it failed to convince Assad to make any concessions. Every single aspect of Syria’s crisis has worsened since Assad stepped onto Saudi soil last May.

Shortly before Syria’s readmission to the Arab League, the core Arab states most actively supportive of the normalization initiative met in Jordan alongside Syria’s foreign minister to lay the groundwork for an “Arab leadership role in efforts to resolve the Syrian crisis.” According to the resulting Amman Communique and a series of follow-up documents, the regional initiative identified five core priorities to be accomplished through the work of what came to be known as the Arab Liaison Committee (ALC): increase and expand humanitarian aid delivery; establish conditions necessary for large-scale refugee returns; end the production and export of illegal drugs from Syria; resume the work of the Constitutional Committee and achieve a political solution, in line with U.N. Security Council Resolution 2254; and establish an international security body to coordinate efforts to counter terrorism in Syria.

Since that time, the ALC has met several times, and regional bilateral engagements with Assad’s regime have continued—but work on all five issues has never gotten off the ground. The envisioned “step-for-step” process of reciprocal concessions never went further than the wave of high-profile visits with Assad in early 2023 and his return to the Arab League. When it comes to the political process, not only has there been no progress made, but the Constitutional Committee is now effectively dead, and Assad has repeatedly communicated to Arab states his refusal to engage in any future processes.

In the past year, aid access remains as restricted as ever, while the aid itself is falling to its lowest levels ever, amid huge cuts. Despite 90 percent of Syrians living under the poverty line, the World Food Program has already shuttered its entire effort in Syria, and the U.N. humanitarian response plan is currently just 6 percent funded. Meanwhile, refugees continue to refuse to return to a Syria still ruled by Assad, with U.N. polling indicating just 1 percent would consider a future return if current conditions persist. Feeling increasingly strained, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey have turned to differing levels of forceful deportations—violating international humanitarian law.

While deadly conflict continues in every corner of the country, the drugs trade—sponsored and protected by the regime—continues apace, exporting billions of dollars of the amphetamine captagon across the region, utilizing local, regional, and global smuggling routes by land and sea. In fact, the regime-facilitated drug smuggling industry has tripled its rate of smuggling activities on the Jordanian border in the last 12 months. To rub further salt in the wound, within 48 hours of Saudi Arabia’s May 26 appointment of an Ambassador to Syria, approximately $75 million of captagon manufactured by Assad regime actors was seized on Saudi soil, and a further $40 million worth in Iraq.

Not only has the regime’s drug trade continued, but it has diversified, to now include crystal meth and weapons, delivered by drones and sophisticated groups of heavily armed smugglers linked to the regime’s elite 4th Division and allied Iranian proxies. Having been most acutely concerned about the drugs threat, Jordan initially invested in a working relationship with Syrian regime intelligence, but it has now done a 180-degree shift and turned to shooting down drones, engaging in increasingly heavy and prolonged border clashes and conducting airstrikes deep inside regime-held areas of Syria.

With the sense of failure clear, regional states initially sought to engage the United States and European partners on paths forward on Syria, but any energy to do so soon fizzled after Hamas’s assault on Israel and the resulting Israeli campaign in Gaza. This year, previously scheduled ALC summits have been repeatedly postponed amid Syrian regime obstructionism and a refusal by the likes of Jordan to engage. That Jordan is putting up such a wall is unsurprising but also illustrative of the profound failure of the Arab initiative. Jordan’s King Abdullah II was arguably the central architect of the normalizing agenda, his government having presented a white paper on reengagement in 2021 and shopped it around intensively in Moscow, Washington, and elsewhere.

In the United States, interest in Syria policy has waned for years now, but the Biden administration did quietly encourage regional reengagement last year and has effectively blocked Congress from moving forward with the Assad Regime Anti-Normalization Act. Though it opposes normalization in theory, it has done little if anything to stop it, while its intervention in congressional legislation-making has sent concerning signals. As things stand, the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act is set to expire in December, and without it, governments and entities around the world would be free to engage and invest in Assad’s regime almost at will. That vacuum requires filling, swiftly.

Ultimately, after more than 13 years, Syria’s crisis remains wholly unresolved, while conditions inside the country are worse than ever before—and continuing to deteriorate. The regional effort to get things moving forward failed spectacularly because it was driven by all the wrong assumptions. That is not to say that diplomacy is of no use, but it cannot work if the regime is awarded unconditionally from the outset. It also requires the collective effort, will, and serious investment of the entire international community. U.S. indifference cannot continue if Syria has any hope of escaping its current disaster.