Saudi state media reported today that their foreign ministry said they were in talks with Syria on resuming diplomatic work, after eleven years. Saudi Arabia had supported fundamentalist insurrectionists against Syria’s Assad. State-owned Al Ekhbariya TV, cited a source in the foreign ministry on the discussions, and the Saudi foreign minister had publicly acknowledged a growing consensus for cooperation with Syria amongst the Arab League countries. The Arab League’s secretary-general, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, recently said that most member states want to restore Syria’s membership at the upcoming summit in May.
On Syria’s end, Waddah Abd Rabbo, editor of Syria’s al-Watan newspaper, had recently posted: “From my private sources: it was agreed to reopen the Saudi consulate within a few weeks, and the kingdom’s foreign minister will visit Damascus.” He told Middle East Eye: “A few days ago, an important meeting took place in Riyadh between Syrian and Saudi officials. It was the first political contact between the two and future steps to restore relations between the two countries were determined.”
Middle East Eye went further: “It was widely reported — yet not officially confirmed — that Maher al-Assad, the Syrian president’s brother … visited Saudi Arabia earlier this week and received the kingdom’s conditions for normalization. (Reuters’ source, however, named the official as Hussam Louqa, the head of Syria’s intelligence committee.) Middle East Eye continued, reporting an anonymous Syrian official as saying: “Things are getting closer. The Saudi deal with Iran is definitely another obstacle out of the way of more re-engagement. Saudi Arabia is a core Arab state.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that the discussions in Riyadh were brokered by Russia. If true, that puts China and Russia at the center of diplomatic breakthroughs for peace, in areas in which London and Washington spent decades pretending to the world that nothing was possible. The WSJ noted that the freezing out of the US out from the Saudi-Syrian affair, and the previous Saudi-Iran deal, has caught Washington completely off-guard.