UAE ambassador takes up Syrian post after 13 years

The first United Arab Emirates ambassador to Syria in almost 13 years, Hassan Ahmad al-Shihi, officially took up his post on Tuesday in the country’s capital.

A sign of the thawing relationship between Syria’s Bashar Assad government and the rest of the Arab world, the introduction of the UAE ambassador represents the country’s budding reintegration into a bloc from which it was once completely exiled.

Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad directly received Ambassador Shihi’s credentials, welcoming him to Damascus, Syrian state media reported.

Shihi arrived in the country on Monday, according to the pro-Assad newspaper Al-Watan. The UAE’s diplomatic mission to Syria was restarted in 2018, and a chargé d’affaires has overseen the embassy there since then.

Arab League restored Syria's membership last May after 12 years

In March 2022, the Syrian president, whose country has been embroiled in a devastating civil war for almost a decade and a half, traveled to the UAE as part of an official delegation, making the Gulf state the first Arab nation to host the outcast dictator since the war began.

The 22-member Arab League voted to restore Syria’s membership in the body last May, ending a 12-year suspension that made Syria an international pariah. Assad participated in the Arab League summit in Saudi Arabia that same month.

Despite Western pressure to topple the regime, given Assad’s brutal crackdown during the civil war, which included the use of chemical weapons on civilians and a policy of mass extrajudicial killings of dissidents, the flailing dictatorship was propped up by generous Iranian and Russian military aid and seems to have weathered the storm.