Arab League's bold bid to end Syrian crisis faces challenges

Meeting of the League's five-nation committee signals resumption of long-dormant meetings on a new constitution

Syrian President Bashar Al Assad's forces keep away from the north-east of the country that is controlled by US-supported Kurdish forces. AFP

The Arab League is boldly pursuing hopes of resolving the Syrian crisis, declaring only a “political solution” will work.

However, the intractability of the problems facing the nation, the conflicting interests of stakeholders and a diplomatic landscape complicated by the Ukraine war could mean it will be years before any tangible progress is made, political analysts say.

Offering a glimpse of hope, a five-nation Arab League committee set up in May to oversee the re-establishment of relations with Syria on Tuesday said a meeting of a dormant, Geneva-based committee mandated with drafting a new constitution for Syria will meet in Oman before the end of the year.

Like other countries swept up in the 2010-11 Arab uprisings, Syria’s fate remains unresolved, with Iran, Russia, Turkey and the US clinging to slices of the country they carved out for themselves, while Arab influence over the nation has waned in the past decade.

“A political solution is the only formula to resolve the Syrian crisis,” said a declaration issued by the foreign ministers of the five nations making up the Arab League committee – Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon – after their first meeting in Cairo on Tuesday.

That assertion that a political solution is the only viable one for Syria is designed in large part to discourage President Bashar Al Assad's government from using force to recapture areas in the north of the country held by rebels.

Anis Salem, a former Egyptian diplomat who closely monitors Syria, said the Arab League had a "limited role" in shepherding a resolution to the Syrian crisis.

But "it's providing an avenue for reintegrating Damascus in the Arab regional system and rebalancing the multiple foreign parties that are involved in Syria”, he said.

“The complexity of the Syrian dilemma lies in how to engineer a credible political order that brings together the various internal parties,” said Mr Salem, who now sits on the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs.

Significantly, Tuesday's declaration made no mention of the opposition, which accounts for one third of the 150-member constitutional committee. Mr Al Assad's loyalists constitute another third, with the remainder composed of Syrians appointed by the UN.

Syrian political commentator Ayman Abdelnour said the reference to the constitutional committee was the main politically concrete part of the declaration.

“Other than that it contains nothing positive, nor negative,” he said. “The Arab countries don’t want to appear negative so the regime would stop attending".

Too much praise for Damascus and “the regime will come to the Arab countries wanting a price”, Mr Abdelnour added.

Members of the five-nation Arab committee on Syria meeting in Cairo. AFP

Russia, Mr Assad’s main backer, has insisted the UN-supervised meeting of the committee be moved to Oman or any other country, arguing it did not see Geneva as a neutral venue.

It highlights the influence of foreign players in the Syrian crisis.

The committee has not met since May last year and no significant proposal was adopted in its previous eight meetings.

But it is not clear whether Turkey, a main supporter of the Syrian opposition and another major stakeholder in Syria, has agreed to the shift of venue.

Turkey repelled a Russian-supported offensive in 2020 to take back the rebel-controlled region of Idlib in north-west Syria, placing the Turks and Russians on the brink of military confrontation.

Mr Al Assad's forces also keep away from the north-east of the country that is controlled by US-supported Kurdish forces.

The re-engagement of the Arab League member states in the Syrian crisis comes as relations improve between Arab powers and Ankara.

It ends an eight-year hiatus by an organisation that has over the years gained a reputation for being a little more than a talking shop and not an effective player such as the EU or the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC).

Its bold attempt to send peacekeepers to Syria during the early days of the civil war proved ineffective, forcing the Cairo-based organisation to back off and instead throw Syria out of the group for its violent response to pro-democracy protests.

Still, the Arab League's re-entry into the Syrian crisis is seen widely as commendable and ambitious, given the changed geopolitical landscape in the region dominated by non-Arab powers with more sway over the combatants.

Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad in talks at Egypt's Foreign Ministry in Cairo. AFP

In May, Mr Al Assad was invited to an Arab League summit in Saudi Arabia. Riyadh and other Arab nations later agreed further support for Damascus hinged on reciprocity from the Syrian President.

Mr Al Assad's ostracisation followed the violent suppression of a peaceful 2011 revolt against his rule but by the end of that tumultuous year, Syria was in a fully fledged civil war.

Several Arab countries supported rebel groups fighting against the government and its loyalist forces and pro-Iranian Shiite militias in the ensuing conflict. But that changed when Russia intervened in 2015 on the side of the government, helping to ensure the survival of a regime teetering on the brink of collapse, as the rebels closed in on Mr Assad's stronghold in Damascus.

The Russian intervention forced western and Arab support for the rebels to cease, allowing Moscow to dominate the international diplomacy on Syria. But Washington re-entered the scene last year, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine altered the US posture in the Middle East.

In yet another demonstration of Russian power, a transitional period that was supposed to precede the drafting of a new Syrian constitution has been largely ignored.

Russia carved its own track on Syria, forming in 2016, with US and UN blessing, the Astana track, composed of Russia, Turkey and Iran.

Long queues for fuel in Idlib province, north-west Syria. AP

While lacking cohesion between Moscow and Ankara, the Astana participants are united in their opposition to US military presence in Syria.

Khaled Al Helou, a former judge and member of the opposition’s constitutional committee, said the five-nation Arab committee was seeking to play an interlocutor role to narrow differences over Syria between the US and Russia.

The Arab states, he said, were acting “as if they have a mandate from everyone to solve the Syrian issue".

“In reality it is more difficult than that,” Mr Al Helou said. “But if the constitutional committee meets, it means that the Arabs are [succeeding in] mediating between the West and the Astana group.”

In the declaration that followed the committee's meeting in Cairo, the five Arab ministers welcomed a decision by the Syrian authorities to renew humanitarian access to rebel-held regions in the country's north.

They also said they “look forward to continuing and intensifying joint co-operation” with Damascus on curbing drug smuggling.