DUBAI (Reuters) – Syrian President Bashar al-Assad paid the United Arab Emirates on Friday his first visit to an Arab country since the start of the war in Syria in 2011, symbolizing the warming of ties between Damascus and this ally of the United States who once financed the Syrian rebellion.
In a statement, US State Department spokesman Ned Price said the United States was “deeply owed and disturbed by this apparent attempt to legitimize” Bashar al-Assad.
“We urge states contemplating a rapprochement with the Assad regime to reflect carefully on the atrocities committed by this regime against Syrians over the past decade,” he said.
The United States deplored the efforts of several Arab countries to rehabilitate Bashar al-Assad or normalize their ties with Syria until a political solution is found to the conflict. Washington thus expressed its concern when the Foreign Minister of the Emirates visited Damascus last November.
But both the Emirates and Saudi Arabia distanced themselves from the US administration when it stopped supporting their war effort in Yemen and imposed conditions on their arms sales to the Gulf monarchies.
Bashar al-Assad met with Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohamed bin Zaed al-Nahyan, who “stressed that Syria is a fundamental pillar of Arab security, and that the United Arab Emirates is eager to strengthen cooperation with it “, reported the mirati news agency WAM.
Sheikh Mohamed “expressed the wish that this visit will allow peace and stability to prevail in Syria and in the whole region”, added the WAM agency.
Bashar al-Assad also met the vice-president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, the emir of Duba Mohamed ben Rashid al-Maktoum, according to the Syrian presidency.
Bashar al-Assad’s only trips abroad since the start of the war, which has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees, have so far been confined to Iran and Russia, his two allies who enabled him to reverse the course of the conflict against the rebels.
(Moataz Mohamed report, with Eric Beech Washington; written by Tom Perry, French version Jean-Stphane Brosse)