Divided, Besieged Syria Presents ‘Conditions’ for Normalization

Soldiers near the Syrian and Russian flags in Daraa, Syria (Reuters)
Soldiers near the Syrian and Russian flags in Daraa, Syria (Reuters)
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Divided, Besieged Syria Presents ‘Conditions’ for Normalization

Soldiers near the Syrian and Russian flags in Daraa, Syria (Reuters)
Soldiers near the Syrian and Russian flags in Daraa, Syria (Reuters)

Damascus wants to and is trying to impose its conditions.

Despite Syria being divided into three main spheres of influence with five different armies operating, Damascus believes it can submit normalization requests. This feeling ran even higher after the “Afghan slap.”

Problems and crises have not changed and may have even increased, exacerbated, and deepened. But Damascus believes that it is in a “stronger negotiating position,” and that time is in its favor so long that Washington has abandoned its principles of “nation-building” and “regime change.”

For Damascus, Moscow’s support makes it believe it is capable of objecting. Whenever the Syrian capital is in doubt, Russia lends a helping hand.

Examples corroborating that analogy are ample, especially when reviewing the course of developments over the last few days. Damascus had hesitated in receiving UN Special Envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen ever since the start of 2021. But what started with strong rejection was mellowed out by a Russian intervention that got Damascus to say yes to Pedersen’s visit.

Pedersen is scheduled to meet with Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal al-Mekdad on Saturday.

This visit, for Damascus, comes post regime forces entering the governorate of Daraa. Ten years ago, the southwestern governorate and its capital of the same name were the cradle for Syria’s uprising.

Keen to return to the area through peace or war, Damascus claims that “the conspiracy started in Daraa and that it is where it should be buried.” Syrian rebels, however, believe that their revolution had sprung out of Daraa and that it will not be quelled to the regime’s content.

Moscow doesn’t mind pacing its work according to Damascus’ timing and wishes. It even sent the deputy Russian defense minister to confirm that the regime and its allies would enter Daraa either under truce or by force.

Nevertheless, Damascus is oblivious to the enigmas behind why Russia is in a rush to enter Daraa. For Moscow, how fast it closes in on capturing Daraa is tied to three key dates.

The first date is marked by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s meeting with his Israeli counterpart, Yair Lapid, to prepare for Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s visit to Moscow in October.

In a foreign ministry statement that preceded Lapid’s arrival, Moscow openly expressed its desire to prevent Syria from becoming a theater for military confrontation between other states, stressing that such wars threaten to spill over across the whole region.

In other words, Moscow does not want Israeli airstrikes in Syria to evolve to a full-fledged military battle between Damascus and Tel Aviv or between Tel Aviv and Tehran.

The second date involves a meeting of the Syrian, Jordanian, Egyptian, and Lebanese oil ministers in Amman to discuss the transfer of Egyptian gas to Lebanon via Syria.

Washington had agreed to this and that the Biden administration even approved a Jordanian request to waive any penalties pertaining to the Caesar Act.

Regarding this process, Damascus put in place several conditions.

The first of these conditions was resuming political visits to Syria, and this is what happened with the arrival of a Lebanese ministerial delegation for the first time since 2011. The second was holding an Arab ministerial meeting with the participation of Syria in Amman.

The third and final condition was an implicit acknowledgment of accepting the regime’s official return to Daraa’s provincial capital, where tens of kilometers of gas pipelines need repairing and security is required to control Jordan’s borders.

As for the third key date, it anticipates the Syrian-US dialogue. It has already been agreed that the White House National Security Council's Middle East policy coordinator, Brett McGurk, will meet with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin and the Kremlin’s special envoy for Syria Alexander Lavrentiev in Geneva on September 14 and 15.

So far, the Russia-West dispute in Syria remains on the premise of “whoever blinks first loses.”
A few days ago, in a closed session, Lavrov told European officials that they needed to help rebuild Syria and talk to President Bashar al-Assad there. Still, they insisted that the regime needs to change its behavior first.

The reality of the situation is that while the Syrians are waiting on the embers of ruin for foreign players to make their move, Russia continues to advance its own conditions and undermine Western references and policies.



What to Know about the Tensions between Iran and the US before Their Third Round of Talks

The flags of US and Iran are displayed in Muscat, Oman, 25 April 2025. Iran and US will hold third round of nuclear talks on 26 April 2025, in Muscat. (EPA)
The flags of US and Iran are displayed in Muscat, Oman, 25 April 2025. Iran and US will hold third round of nuclear talks on 26 April 2025, in Muscat. (EPA)
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What to Know about the Tensions between Iran and the US before Their Third Round of Talks

The flags of US and Iran are displayed in Muscat, Oman, 25 April 2025. Iran and US will hold third round of nuclear talks on 26 April 2025, in Muscat. (EPA)
The flags of US and Iran are displayed in Muscat, Oman, 25 April 2025. Iran and US will hold third round of nuclear talks on 26 April 2025, in Muscat. (EPA)

Iran and the United States will hold talks Saturday in Oman, their third round of negotiations over Tehran’s rapidly advancing nuclear program.

The talks follow a first round held in Muscat, Oman, where the two sides spoke face to face. They then met again in Rome last weekend before this scheduled meeting again in Muscat.

Trump has imposed new sanctions on Iran as part of his “maximum pressure” campaign targeting the country. He has repeatedly suggested military action against Iran remained a possibility, while emphasizing he still believed a new deal could be reached by writing a letter to Iran’s 85-year-old Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to jumpstart these talks.

Khamenei has warned Iran would respond to any attack with an attack of its own.

Here’s what to know about the letter, Iran’s nuclear program and the tensions that have stalked relations between Tehran and Washington since the 1979 revolution.

Why did Trump write the letter? Trump dispatched the letter to Khamenei on March 5, then gave a television interview the next day in which he acknowledged sending it. He said: “I’ve written them a letter saying, ‘I hope you’re going to negotiate because if we have to go in militarily, it’s going to be a terrible thing.’”

Since returning to the White House, the president has been pushing for talks while ratcheting up sanctions and suggesting a military strike by Israel or the US could target Iranian nuclear sites.

A previous letter from Trump during his first term drew an angry retort from the supreme leader.

But Trump’s letters to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in his first term led to face-to-face meetings, though no deals to limit Pyongyang’s atomic bombs and a missile program capable of reaching the continental US.

How did the first round go? Oman, a sultanate on the eastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, hosted the first round of talks between Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff. The two men met face to face after indirect talks and immediately agreed to this second round in Rome.

Witkoff later made a television appearance in which he suggested 3.67% enrichment for Iran could be something the countries could agree on. But that’s exactly the terms set by the 2015 nuclear deal struck under US President Barack Obama, from which Trump unilaterally withdrew America.

Witkoff hours later issued a statement underlining something: “A deal with Iran will only be completed if it is a Trump deal.” Araghchi and Iranian officials have latched onto Witkoff’s comments in recent days as a sign that America was sending it mixed signals about the negotiations.

Yet the Rome talks ended up with the two sides agreeing to starting expert-level talks this Saturday. Analysts described that as a positive sign, though much likely remains to be agreed before reaching a tentative deal.

Why does Iran’s nuclear program worry the West? Iran has insisted for decades that its nuclear program is peaceful. However, its officials increasingly threaten to pursue a nuclear weapon. Iran now enriches uranium to near weapons-grade levels of 60%, the only country in the world without a nuclear weapons program to do so.

Under the original 2015 nuclear deal, Iran was allowed to enrich uranium up to 3.67% purity and to maintain a uranium stockpile of 300 kilograms (661 pounds). The last report by the International Atomic Energy Agency on Iran’s program put its stockpile at 8,294.4 kilograms (18,286 pounds) as it enriches a fraction of it to 60% purity.

US intelligence agencies assess that Iran has yet to begin a weapons program, but has “undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so.”

Ali Larijani, an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, has warned in a televised interview that his country has the capability to build nuclear weapons, but it is not pursuing it and has no problem with the International Atomic Energy Agency’s inspections. However, he said if the US or Israel were to attack Iran over the issue, the country would have no choice but to move toward nuclear weapon development.

“If you make a mistake regarding Iran’s nuclear issue, you will force Iran to take that path, because it must defend itself,” he said.

Why are relations so bad between Iran and the US? Iran was once one of the US’s top allies in the Middle East under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who purchased American military weapons and allowed CIA technicians to run secret listening posts monitoring the neighboring Soviet Union. The CIA had fomented a 1953 coup that cemented the shah’s rule.

But in January 1979, the shah, fatally ill with cancer, fled Iran as mass demonstrations swelled against his rule. The revolution followed, led by Khomeini, and created Iran’s theocratic government.

Later that year, university students overran the US Embassy in Tehran, seeking the shah’s extradition and sparking the 444-day hostage crisis that saw diplomatic relations between Iran and the US severed. The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s saw the US back Saddam Hussein. The “Tanker War” during that conflict saw the US launch a one-day assault that crippled Iran at sea, while the US later shot down an Iranian commercial airliner that the American military said it mistook for a warplane.

Iran and the US have see-sawed between enmity and grudging diplomacy in the years since, with relations peaking when Tehran made the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. But Trump unilaterally withdrew America from the accord in 2018, sparking tensions in the Middle East that persist today.