Normalizing Assad Has Made Syria’s Problems Even Worse

Three months ago, Saudi Arabia kick-started a concerted regional effort to reengage and normalize Syria’s regime within the Middle East and, Riyadh hoped, farther afield. On April 18, Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian capital of Damascus. Just one month later, on May 19, the Arab League embraced one of the world’s most notorious war criminals for the first time since 2011.

While Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s decision to reengage triggered this regional shift, its roots lie a little deeper. The United Arab Emirates began restoring relations with Assad’s regime in 2018, and it has pushed hard for others to follow suit ever since. More recently, Jordan and its king, Abdullah II—long a close and reliable U.S. ally—have emerged as a key architect of the plan to normalize Assad, drafting secretive white papers for dissemination across the region as well as in Moscow and Washington. Underpinning Jordan’s vision was the idea that only by reengaging the Assad regime could diplomacy achieve meaningful concessions from Assad and, in doing so, Syria would be oriented back onto a path toward stability and recovery.

With more than half a million people dead, after nearly 340 chemical weapons attacks, 82,000 barrel bombs, dozens of medieval-style sieges, and much more, the region’s decision to reembrace Assad was no insignificant thing. It has also not been a unanimous decision, with Qatar a strong opponent, followed closely behind by Kuwait and Morocco. But the Middle East works by consensus, not unanimity, and Mohammed bin Salman’s decision to pivot has changed everything.

Beyond the region, the prospect of normalizing Assad remains a deeply distasteful proposition. Europe shows no sign of following suit, nor does the United States, although some senior White House officials have privately greenlighted the region’s pivot. For some within the administration, Middle Eastern crises such as Syria’s are viewed as essentially unresolvable, peripheral to U.S. interests, and not worth the effort. At the same time, according to two regional and two European officials who recently conducted separate meetings in Washington, all of whom spoke to me on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic conversations, one senior Biden administration official has taken to lauding the U.S. role in achieving “the most stable Middle East in 25 years.”

Notwithstanding the factual issues with such a claim, it is likely based in large part on the recent wave of so-called de-escalation across the region, as adversarial and rival governments have reengaged and papered over their differences. The durability of these developments remains unclear, but for many in the region, the normalization of Assad’s regime is part and parcel of this de-escalation. As such, it came as no surprise when one Biden appointee, Assistant Secretary of State Barbara Leaf, called on regional states in March to “get something” in return for their efforts. In retrospect, there can be no doubting how consequential that statement was in triggering concerted regional normalization and significantly weakening Washington’s claimed posture toward Assad.

It has now been three months since the Saudi visit to Damascus set in motion the region’s reembrace of Assad. In mid-August, regional states plan to convene a follow-up summit to discuss progress and next steps. According to officials from three regional states, the entire summit is up in the air. Why? Because every problem in Syria has significantly worsened since April. If regional states were issued a report card, it would barely deserve an F.

Aid Access

A core goal underpinning the region’s normalization of Assad was a desire to see Syria stabilize. For more than a decade, the international community has supported a humanitarian aid effort across Syria worth tens of billions of dollars, meeting the needs of millions of people. The most vulnerable 4.5 million live in a small corner of Syria’s northwest, which is home to the world’s most acute humanitarian crisis. On July 11, Russia vetoed an extension of the United Nations’ 9-year-old mechanism for cross-border aid provision into the northwest, severing a vital lifeline and plunging the area into a profound and unprecedented state of uncertainty.

Days after Russia’s veto, the Assad regime announced an offer to open aid access to the region but added a set of conditions that made the offer practically impossible to implement. Even if the regime’s scheme were somehow implemented, the flow of aid would be a fraction of what was possible under the previous arrangement. For two years, the regime has sought to prioritize cross-line aid delivered from Damascus, and in that time, 152 trucks have been sent. In the same two-year period, more than 24,000 trucks arrived cross-border. As things stand, there is now no mechanism to provide unhindered aid to northwestern Syria and no serious effort to create one. So much for the idea that engaging Assad would bring forth concessions.

Captagon

One issue that Saudi Arabia and Jordan had been most concerned about emanating from Syria was the trade in captagon, an illegal amphetamine produced on an industrial scale by prominent Assad regime figures. Between 2016 and 2022, more than a billion Syrian-made captagon pills were seized around the world, most in the Persian Gulf. In engagements with Assad’s regime, regional states have sought to convince Assad to put an end to the trade.

Given the regime’s central role as well as the stunning profit margins involved—one pill can cost several cents to produce but sells in the Gulf for $20—Damascus’s promise in May to regional governments that it would curb the captagon trade was at best a laughable claim. Nevertheless, Jordan just welcomed two of the most notorious and internationally sanctioned regime officials—Assad’s defense minister and intelligence chief—to Amman to discuss combating drug trafficking, only to be forced to shoot down a drone carrying drugs from Syria just a day later.

Meanwhile, data I’ve collected monitoring regional seizures shows that a massive $1 billion worth of Syrian-made captagon has been confiscated across the region in the last three months, in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, Kuwait, Iraq, Turkey, and Jordan. Even more significantly, German authorities just discovered a Syrian-run captagon production facility in southern Germany along with approximately $20 million worth of pills and 2.5 tons of precursor chemicals.

Refugees

Regional states also hoped that reengaging with Assad’s regime would open a path for refugee returns to Syria. After all, the presence of large numbers of Syrian refugees in neighboring countries—3.6 million in Turkey, 1.5 million in Lebanon, and 700,000 in Jordan—is placing an increasingly untenable strain on host countries.

Yet the logic behind regional hopes is inexplicable. All of the most significant reasons why Syrian refugees refuse to return are associated with regime rule. Indeed, new U.N. polling of Syrian refugees released just days after Assad’s participation in the Arab League summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, revealed that just 1 percent were considering returning in the next year.

By so actively normalizing Assad’s rule, regional states have given many among that 1 percent reason to reconsider. What’s more, refugees are now voting with their feet, taking perilous journeys toward Europe at an exponential rate—with the rate of Syrian migration north now at least 150 percent higher than in 2021. Now faced with this bleak reality, host states are enacting policies to coerce refugees to leave, with Lebanon’s U.S.-funded armed forces resorting to forcible expulsions and Jordan declaring that financial support for Syrian refugees will soon end.

Economic Collapse and Violent Escalation

In the past three months, Syria’s economy has precipitously collapsed, with the Syrian pound having lost 77 percent of its value. When the Saudi foreign minister visited Damascus in April, the Syrian pound was worth 7,500 to $1, but today, that number is 13,300.

Having been welcomed back into the regional fold while simultaneously benefiting from U.S. and European sanctions waivers in the wake of the February earthquake, Assad’s economy should not look like this. The fault here lies with the regime itself, which has proved systematically corrupt, incompetent, and driven by greed rather than the public good. Fiscal mismanagement and the prioritization of the illegal drugs trade have killed the Syrian economy, potentially for good.

As the region yearns for a stable Syria, ruled by a strong but reformed regime that welcomes refugees back home, the past three months have told a starkly different picture—one of escalation. Nearly 150 people have been killed in the southern governorate of Daraa since April, furthering the area’s status as the most consistently unstable region of the country since 2020.

In mid-July, regime forces besieged villages south of the town of Tafas that it accused of harboring opponents, before demolishing 18 homes as punishment. Since its violent submission to the regime five years ago, Daraa was meant to exemplify Assad’s self-described plans to “reconcile” areas formerly controlled by his opponents. But reconciliation in Daraa has been anything but, and the region is now rife with insurgency, terrorism, organized crime, and a chaotic mess of political infighting.

Meanwhile, the regime has also escalated its attacks on the opposition-controlled northwest. Not long after Assad walked the red carpet into the Arab League summit in Jeddah, Russia resumed airstrikes in northwestern Syria for the first time since November 2022—launching nearly 35 in June alone. Along with Russian jets, pro-regime artillery fire also surged from May into June, resulting in a 560 percent increase in fatalities in the northwest in June, from five in April to three in May to 33 in June. That marked escalation included the resumption of mass casualty regime bombings of civilian targets, including one attack that destroyed a market on June 25, leaving at least 13 dead. Civilian rescue workers also returned to being explicit targets, including the “double-tap” attack that targeted White Helmet personnel on July 11.

Terrorism

Regional normalization of Assad’s regime has also dealt a deep and likely irreversible blow to nearly a decade of international efforts to counter the Islamic State. For years, the United States has relied on the cover provided by regional partners such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia to sustain the vital U.S. military deployment in northeastern Syria, but those partners are now declaring their support for the expansion of Assad’s rule nationwide, including via the removal of foreign forces.

Worse still, having long been among the most generous donors to counter-Islamic State operations, Saudi Arabia failed to donate anything in the recent annual ministerial conference—which was hosted in Saudi Arabia itself. Assad’s normalization has also gravely undercut the leverage of the U.S.-partnered Syrian Democratic Forces to determine or negotiate their long-term survival. Russia and Iran have also been empowered, with reports of Iranian attack plotting and daily Russian violations of a long-standing deconfliction arrangement in order to challenge and threaten U.S. aircraft.

While the U.S.-led coalition’s ability to sustain the only meaningful counter to the Islamic State in Syria has been shoved into a tight and uncomfortable corner, the terrorist group also appears to be benefiting directly from Assad’s new status. As Assad was taking his seat in the Arab League in May, the Islamic State was in the midst of its most aggressive and deadly month of operations in regime-controlled areas of Syria since 2018.

Between April 1 and July 1, the group conducted 61 attacks and killed 159 people in regime-run central Syria—amounting to 50 percent of all attacks and 90 percent of fatalities achieved in 2022. The Islamic State has returned to controlling populated territory (albeit temporarily) in regime areas of Syria, and it defeated a six-week offensive in March and April by Syrian regime forces that was backed by the Russian air force and Iranian proxies. In late July, the Islamic State expanded its reach into Damascus, killing at least six people and wounding 23 others in a bomb attack in the Shiite district of Sayida Zeinab.

Assad’s Diplomatic Veto

Finally, the regional normalization of Assad—which the Arab League said was supposed to be “conditional” on securing regime concessions—appears to have wrecked any hope for meaningful diplomacy aimed at genuinely resolving Syria’s crisis. According to senior U.N. officials who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations, Assad himself has conveyed to U.N. leaders in recent weeks that he has no intention to reengage with the U.N.-run Constitutional Committee or in any step-for-step negotiation process, whether coordinated by the U.N. or regional states. The prospect for a diplomatic resolution to Syria’s crisis may have looked bleak six months ago, but regional engagements with the regime since April appear to have killed things altogether.

The regime’s stance toward cross-border aid should serve as a clear indicator of the extent to which Assad feels irreversibly empowered since being welcomed back by much of the region. Even convincing Assad to issue a small prisoner amnesty as a show of goodwill appears to be a non-starter.

The picture here is stark and irrefutable. The chorus of warnings that reengagement with Assad would backfire were ignored, and the consequences are now clear for all to see. That regional states’ plans for a follow-up summit are up in the air speaks for itself. To meet amid such calamitous developments would be folly. Syria is now entering a deeply dark period of uncertainty, with a crashing economy, rising levels of violence, heightening geopolitical tensions, and a poisoned diplomatic environment. The fault here lies in many different corners, but as usual, it will be Syrians who suffer the costs.