The Oakland Press

Quake brings chance for Syria’s Assad to ease isolation

- By Kareem Chehayeb

On his first public visit touring the destructio­n wreaked by this week’s deadly earthquake that hit Turkey and Syria, Syrian President Bashar Assad on Friday pointedly shamed the West for shunning his country.

The embattled president may see the disaster, which shattered much of northern Syria, as an opportunit­y to push for an easing of his country’s isolation — if not from the United States and the European Union, which have enforced sanctions for years over the long, brutal civil war, then from Arab nations.

“The West prioritize­d politics over the humanitari­an situation,” Assad told a group of reporters while visiting the Aleppo neighborho­od of Masharqa, devastated by Monday’s 7.8-magnitude quake. “It’s natural that they politicize the situation, but there is no humanitari­anism, neither now nor in the past.”

Assad’s carefully choreograp­hed tour came five days after the quake hit, a contrast to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been visiting devastated parts of Turkey for several days.

The tragedy presents a danger for Assad from the sheer weight of new misery the quake brings to Syrians. The country has been crippled by an economic crisis that has pulled 90% of its population into poverty. Now as many as 5.3 million people may have been left homeless in Syria by the disaster, the U.N. refugee agency estimated.

Major fighting in the 12-year-old civil war eased years ago, but Syrians have only seen conditions get worse. Many were already struggling to afford food and fuel for heating. Rising frustratio­n has sparked rare protests and critical voices against Assad in government-held territory for the first time in a decade. Failure to deliver aid or recover from the quake could further stoke public discontent.

The quake — the world’s deadliest in decades with more than 23,000 dead — left widespread destructio­n across southeaste­rn Turkey and northern Syria, both in the last rebel-held pocket of territory in the northwest and in swaths of government-held territory, particular­ly the city of Aleppo.

Officials in Assad’s government claim American and European sanctions are obstructin­g delivery of aid to Syria and slowing down search and rescue operations to save families still trapped under the rubble.

“Assad is trying to exploit the earthquake­s to get out of internatio­nal isolation,” Lina Khatib, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, told The Associated Press.

“His regime’s call for the lifting of sanctions is an attempt at de facto normalizat­ion with the internatio­nal community,” she added.

The EU said Syria did not formally request aid until three days after the quake, and six member countries are sending help via the U.N.’s World Food Program. The U.S. said it has temporaril­y lifted sanctions that would hamper earthquake relief. Assad and Syrian officials have not commented.

But the U.S. and the EU have made clear they will not end the sanctions imposed over Assad’s crackdown on the opposition and his forces’ brutal methods against rebels in the civil war.

Assad himself has not called for sanctions to be lifted since the earthquake. Khatib said she expects he won’t do so because it would make him look weak in front of his people after years of hard-line rhetoric against Western countries.

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