Less than a year after his lightning rise to power, Syria’s president caps his transformation from jihadist to global statesman with a historic visit to the White House. The visit says as much about the young leader as it does about his push for diplomatic reform in his country.
Monday’s meeting with Ahmad al-Shara, the first White House visit by a Syrian head of state, will be his 20th trip abroad since he was appointed president of Syria in January, but his second visit to the United States, following his visit to the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September.
But the meeting is the most high-profile and high-stakes meeting yet, a previously unthinkable encounter between a top U.S. military commander and a man who has faced American forces on the battlefield.
In May, after a brief meeting brokered by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed, US President Donald Trump praised the 43-year-old Syrian leader as a “young, attractive guy” with a “very strong past” and ordered him to lift some of the crippling US sanctions on Syria, which has been firmly aligned with America’s main enemies Russia and Iran for decades.
However, the toughest sanctions on Damascus remain in place and cannot be completely lifted without parliamentary approval. Al-Shalah’s immediate goal in Washington is to push for their removal while urging President Trump to pressure Israel to halt its attacks on Syria and withdraw its troops from southern Syria.
His broader aim, reflected in his extensive world travels, is to reverse Syria’s isolation, a legacy of the previous regime that devastated the country economically and diplomatically bound it to a narrow axis of alliances.
Against this background, a visit to the White House carries great symbolic weight. After arriving in Washington on Sunday, Al-Shara played basketball with senior U.S. military officials. But in his early 20s, he turned on America as an enemy and joined an Islamic militant group fighting American forces in Iraq. Captured and later released, he traveled to Syria in 2011 and established an al-Qaeda-backed rebel force to fight forces loyal to then-President Bashar al-Assad.
After more than a decade of brutal conflict against the Assad dictatorship, al-Shara launched a surprise attack that quickly toppled the 53-year-old Assad dynasty, a relic of the Arab Cold War, and brought an end to Syria’s long-stalemated civil war.
During its decades in power, the Assad regime relied on aid, arms and unwavering diplomatic support to keep Damascus firmly aligned with Moscow. In 1971, a full year after President Hafez al-Assad came to power, the Soviet Union established a strategic Mediterranean naval base in the Syrian city of Tartus. And it was President Vladimir Putin’s decisive military intervention in 2015 that allowed Bashar al-Assad to survive the civil war.
Russia, which killed scores of Syrians during its campaign to keep Assad in power, continues to maintain control of a military base in Tartus after Assad’s fall. And last month, al-Shara visited Moscow to meet with President Putin.
Al-Sharaa has sought to build relationships with the West, but has been careful not to antagonize Moscow.
“It would be too costly in relation to Syria to get into a conflict with Russia now, and it would not be in the country’s interests,” Al-Shallah said in an interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” that aired in October.
The leader, once sanctioned by the West for terrorism, now appears to be on a global diplomatic charm offensive, supported by aggressive lobbying from regional powers Saudi Arabia and Turkey, both US allies, seeking to fill the power and economic vacuum left by Iran and Russia.
With neighboring Lebanon descending into instability and Iraq remaining fertile ground for Iranian proxy militias, Syria represents both a strategic interest and a significant risk for the United States.
Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, told CNN: “The United States is making a big bet with Ahmad al-Shalah and Syria.” “As US Ambassador (Tom) Barrack has said many times, the US has no alternative. In his assessment, Lebanon is a failed state. Iraq is deeply infiltrated by pro-Iranian militias,” he added.
And despite clear prospects for the West, the former jihadist leader remains adamant about balancing Syria’s foreign policy away from conflict in an increasingly polarized world, a policy now adopted by several developing countries around the world.
Natasha Hall, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said: “In this new era, you can’t be completely aligned with any side. We saw that with (Shara’a’s) visit with President Putin, who is an active ally of the Assad regime… and we see that with diplomacy on behalf of the Syrian government on a global scale.”
