Earthquake offers Assad the pariah a road to redemption

Walking through Aleppo last month, Bashar al-Assad did not look like a man shouldering the fate of a nation.

- Martin Chulov

As he posed for photos with locals, who queued to meet him inspecting damage from the earthquake that had devastated parts of northern Syria, Assad appeared to show as much relief as concern for victims. The country's grinning leader seemed to realise a moment had finally arrived.

Within days of the disaster, international aid chiefs were clamouring for an audience and asking the Syrian outside president for permission to reach even worse hit communities government control. Global bodies were once again deferring to Assad as the sovereign leader of a unified state.

Within days, so too were Syria's neighbours, as foreign ministers from the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Egypt, and officials from other Arab states, travelled to Damascus for an audience, under the pretext of offering condolences. The symbolism, however, fed a seismic shift of a different nature.

For the first time in more than a decade of war and chaos, throughout which Assad had been a pariah in the eyes of his regional rivals, he was being courted as a solution to the crisis that had earned him the tag in the first place.

The man who had presided over the disintegration of his own country, the exile of half its population and an economic ruin almost unmatched anywhere in the world for the past 70 years, had clearly been granted a comeback. A 20 February state visit to Oman, complete with red carpets, motorcades and flag-lined streets, reinforced his return. Syria's readmission to the Arab League will probably follow later this year, cementing Assad's rehabilitation.

"This has been a long time coming," said a regional intelligence figure, who refused to be identified. "The case could no longer be made that the region was safer with Syria encouraged to remain rogue."

Just what Assad has been expected to forgo, or any political leverage his renewed friends may hold over him, remains unclear.