Will the West Normalize with the Assad Regime After His Presidential Pardon?

At the end of April 2022, the head of the Syrian regime Bashar al-Assad issued a presidential decree granting a general amnesty for "terrorist" crimes committed before April 30, 2022, excluding "crimes that led to the death of a human being," according to a statement published by the Syrian News Agency.

Many saw the move as a theatrical attempt especially just days after the British newspaper The Guardian published a report containing video footage documenting the massacre of unarmed civilians in the 2013 massacre of unarmed civilians in the Tadamon neighborhood.

Over the past few years, many Arab countries have taken steps toward normalizing relations with Syria.

The UAE reopened its embassy in Syria in 2018 and important U.S. regional partners such as Egypt and Jordan are trading with Damascus again.

The United States reiterated that the Syrian regime has not provided a need to normalize relations with it.

 

No Real Action

Many activists and followers of the Syrian affairs considered that his pardon was inaugurated in order to mitigate the effects of the massacre of solidarity that opened the door wide on similar, and perhaps more egregious, war crimes committed by Assad's forces backed by Russia and Iran, as well as coverage of the deaths of thousands of detainees in regime prisons over the past 11 years.

Although the head of the Syrian regime, Bashar al-Assad, has already issued six amnesty decrees since the conflict began, with many exceptions, most recently last May, weeks before he was re-elected president for the fourth time, the issue of detainees and missing persons remains one of the most discreet files of the Syrian regime, and international and human rights institutions have been demanding that they be opened and released since 2011, remain unanswered.

Amid the deliberate randomness espoused by the regime in the recent amnesty decree, where no list of names or numbers of those to be released was published, the prison doors were left closed to tens of thousands of detainees and missing persons whose fate remained unknown.

 

Washington’s Position

Despite the Assad regime's war crimes and humanitarian tragedies against unarmed civilians over the past 11 years, a fraction of which was revealed in recent "Tadamon" videos, the Arab normalization train that began a few years ago continues with a U.S. green light.

While the Biden administration has adopted a policy of waiting, not pushing or preventing the recent Arab wave of normalization, the West has lost hope of turning Syria into a democratic country and now believes it makes sense to restore relations with Syria and end sanctions to reduce Russia and Iran's influence in Syria and the Middle East as a whole.

Speaking after her country assumed the rotating presidency of the UN Security Council in May, Washington's UN representative Linda Thomas Greenfield said: "The Assad regime has not provided what it earns the right to normalize relations with the international community, especially since it continues to take its people hostage and continues to violate human rights against Syrians."

"We, therefore, believe it is important that we do everything we can to ensure that cross-border humanitarian assistance continues to flow into Syria."

"Russia asked the UN Secretary-General last December to report on the mechanism of cross-border assistance into Syria," she added.

Commenting on the security council's unanimous adoption last July of a resolution extending the cross-border humanitarian assistance mechanism to Syria until July 10, Greenfield went on to say, "The United States supported maintaining this aid mechanism, and also supported the continued provision of cross-line assistance (i.e. from inside Syria)."

 

Caesar Sanctions

The United States imposes sanctions on the Assad regime under the U.S. Caesar Act, which came into force on June 17, 2020, by freezing reconstruction aid to Syria and prosecuting individuals and entities related to the Syrian regime that are proven to be involved in crimes and violations against the Syrian people.

The law warned Middle East investors that Washington would begin moving to prevent investment from the Assad regime.

Caesar is a name used to hide the true identity of a Syrian military man who leaked photographs of prisoners tortured to death in Assad regime prisons between 2011 and 2013.

The unidentified photographer documented some 55,000 photographs that resonated, evidence of war crimes committed by the Syrian regime, including murder and systematic torture.

When Joe Biden's administration came to the White House in January this year, Middle East governments were largely in the middle east with Biden's support for Caesar's Law and UN Security Council Resolution 2254 of 2015.

The Security Council resolution calls for a ceasefire in all Syrian territory and negotiations on a political settlement that includes seeking "comprehensive, non-sectarian and credible governance," as well as the drafting of a new constitution, and free and fair national elections under the auspices of the United Nations.

But on the ground, since the Biden administration came to power, U.S. diplomacy has not seriously pushed for the implementation of the Security Council resolution or the implementation of Caesar's law but has pursued quiet diplomacy and stopped pursuing any efforts to overthrow the Assad regime.

 

Green Light

According to observers, that unerring U.S. approach to the overthrow of Assad's rule has implicitly given some Arab countries the green light to normalize relations with the Assad regime.

The past few months have witnessed many developments, with Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad attending the UN General Assembly meetings in New York in September, including friendly meetings with the foreign ministers of Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Algeria, Iraq and Oman, and Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shukri pledging to help "restore Syria's place in the Arab world."

Jordan, in particular, sought to accelerate rapprochement with the Assad regime, opening the Jaber border crossing with Syria, and then reviving the Arab Gas Line project, which transports Egyptian natural gas to Lebanon through Jordan and Syria, which will certainly lead to cash payments to Assad.

Instead, the Biden administration advised countries involved in the bill that they could avoid Caesar's law sanctions by financing the deal through the World Bank, which followers see as "fundamentally reinforcing loopholes in Caesar's law."

Relations between the Syrian regime and Jordan culminated in the regime's head Bashar al-Assad's telephone contact with the King of Jordan, reflecting a clear indication that the course of relations between the two countries has taken on much greater political dimensions than the economic divide.

The contact between the King of Jordan and the head of the Syrian regime is the first of its kind since the crisis broke out in 2011.

The UAE and Bahrain have also opened their embassies in Damascus, joining a group of Arab countries with diplomatic representation with the Syrian regime, such as Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Oman, and Algeria.