BY G9IJA
Syria returns to the Arab League, Israel bombards Gaza with air attacks, and it’s almost time for the Turkish elections. Here’s your round up of our coverage, written by Abubakr Al-Shamahi, Al Jazeera Digital’s Middle East and North Africa editor.
Prisons full of dissidents, hundreds of thousands of people killed and millions of refugees. Despite all that, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad will find himself once again sitting at the head table, alongside his fellow leaders at the Arab League summit in Riyadh later this month. The Arab League’s re-embrace of Al-Assad, despite 12 years of war on his own people, did not come as a surprise. Syria’s return to regional favour has been signposted for months, with early normalisers, such as the UAE, passing on the baton of acceptance to Saudi Arabia, whose foreign minister was recently in Damascus.
Arab League member states agreed to welcome Syria back into the organisation on Sunday. The country had been suspended more than a decade ago, punishment for the vicious crackdown on the Syrian opposition who had dared to rise up against al-Assad in 2011. But realpolitik, much like al-Assad, has for the moment emerged victorious. With a weak opposition in control of only a small portion of Syria, and a realignment of the regional order after Saudi Arabia patched things up with Iran, the sense in Arab capitals has been that freezing out al-Assad no longer serves a purpose.
Will the rest of the Arab League get anything in return? Justice is obviously a nonstarter, so the focus instead appears to be on, well, Captagon, an amphetamine-like drug mass-produced in Syria that has exploded in popularity in the Gulf. At a meeting in Amman on May 1, Damascus said it will clamp down on Captagon smuggling. And then on Monday, a day after Syria was welcomed back into the Arab League, a Jordanian air attack reportedly killed a suspected Syrian drug smuggler and his family in southern Syria. Hmm, quid pro quo?