Quake brings chance for Syria's Assad to ease county's isolation
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 22,000 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.