Why is Syria invited to Arab League meet?

Syria has been invited to attend the next meeting of regional cooperation organization the Arab League, to be held in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on May 19. The invitation was issued by the Saudi government, which had long been opposed to normalizing relations with Syria’s Bashar Assad regime and had even previously supported anti-government fighters in the country’s civil war. But the Saudi move is in line with a decision made by regional foreign ministers earlier this month in Cairo, allowing Syria back into the 22-member group.

Syria was suspended from the body in 2011, shortly after its peaceful revolution began to turn into a bloody civil war, one that has since lapsed into a stalemate. Most recently though, members of the Arab League have started to rebuild connections with the authoritarian Assad regime. Their motivations include the hope that this will eventually diminish the influence of Iran and other nations inside Syria, as well as a general acknowledgment that there’s a lack of any better options, now that the civil war has more or less hardened into several implacable fronts.

The Assad government controls around 65% of the country, with other areas still held by its opponents. However, as the Arab League meeting nears, international human rights groups and Syrian civil society organizations have all pointed out that the organization is welcoming back a government that has committed numerous human rights abuses and war crimes. During the conflict, the Syrian regime has been accused of using poison gas on its own people. One of the best known of these incidents was an August 2013 attack on the rebel-held eastern suburbs of Damascus, known as Ghouta. Estimates by various organizations have said between 280 and 1,800 people were killed in the incident.

In 2018, news agency Reuters reported that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons had compared samples taken after the 2013 Ghouta attack with chemicals handed over by Damascus for destruction in 2014. Investigators were able to link the chemicals used in Ghouta and in other locations with Syrian government-supplied substances. This provided further proof for the responsibility of the Syrian government in the poison gas attacks.

After the 2013 attack, the Assad regime signed onto the international Chemical Weapons Convention which prohibits the development, production, possession, transfer and use of chemical weapons.

But little progress has been made on this front, with more chemical weapons attacks following. In 2020, researchers from the Open Society Justice Initiative and the Syrian Archive, a collective of open source investigators based in Berlin, published an investigation into the topic that said the Assad regime has continued to stockpile chemicals and equipment that can be used in warfare. In March, the United Nations Security Council confirmed a lack of progress in assessing Syria’s chemical weapons status, noting that the elimination of the country’s chemical weapons program could not be confirmed.

According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, or SNHR, the Syrian government carried out 217 chemical weapons attacks on its opponents between December 2012 and November 2022. The rights group has estimated that at least 1,500 people died as a result, among them 205 children and 250 women. A further 12,000 people were injured, the SNHR said.