Iran\u2019s president Ebrahim Raisi arrives in Syria for rare meeting with Bashar Assad.Tehran has been a main backer of President Bashar Assad\u2019s government since an uprising turned into a full-blown war in March 2011.
\nIraninan President Ebrahim Raisi landed in Damascus Wednesday on the first visit by an Iranian head of state to the war-wracked country in over a decade.
\nTehran has been a main backer of President Bashar Assad\u2019s government since an uprising turned into a full-blown war in March 2011 and has played an instrumental role in turning the tide in his favor.
\nIran has sent scores of military advisers and thousands of Iran-backed fighters from around the Middle East to fight on Assad\u2019s side. With the help of Russia and Iran, Syrian government forces have controlled large parts of the country in recent years.
\nDuring his two-day visit, Raisi is expected to meet Assad to sign several agreements and memorandums of understanding to boost cooperation, Syrian state and pro-government media reported. In an interview with pan-Arab television channel Al-Mayadeen, Raisi called for reconstruction efforts and for refugees who fled the country\u2019s war to return to the country.
\nRaisi, who is a heading a high-ranking political and economic delegation, was received on arrival at Damascus International Airport by Syrian Economy Minister Samer Al-Khalil.
\nHe is also set to visit the Sayida Zeinab and Sayida Ruqayya shrines, both holy sites in Shiite Islam, as well as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a monument dedicated to Syrian soldiers killed in battle.
\nThe last Iranian president to visit Syria was President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2010.
\nThe Iranian president\u2019s visit comes as some Arab countries, including regional powerhouses Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have been opening up to Assad and their foreign ministers have visited Damascus in recent weeks. Syria\u2019s foreign minister also visited the Saudi capital of Riyadh in April, the first such visit since the two countries cut relations in 2012.
\nIn March, Iran and Saudi Arabia, a main backer of Syrian opposition fighters, reached an agreement in China to re-establish diplomatic relations and reopen embassies after seven years of tensions.
\nThe reconciliation between Iran and Saudi Arabia is likely to have positive effects on regional states where the two countries fought proxy wars, including Syria.
\nSyria was widely shunned by Arab governments over Assad\u2019s brutal crackdown on protesters and the breakdown in relations culminated with Syria being ousted from the Arab League in 2011. The conflict has since killed nearly half a million people and displaced half of Syria\u2019s pre-war population of 23 million.
\n\u201cAmerica and its allies failed on all fronts against the resistance, and could not achieve any of their goals,\u201d Iran\u2019s new ambassador to Syria Hossein Akbari told Iran\u2019s state news agency on Tuesday.
\nRaisi\u2019s visit is the first to Damascus by an Iranian president since 2010 when then ad visited Syria. Assad meanwhile visited Iran twice since the conflict began, the latest of which came in May last year.
\nThe Iranian president\u2019s visit also comes a week after its Minister for Road and Urban Development Mehrdad Bazrpash met Assad in Damascus, where he delivered a message from the Iranian president supporting the expansion of economic relations between the two countries, according to Iran\u2019s state news agency.
\nIran\u2019s military presence in Syria been a major concern for Israel, which has vowed to stop Iranian entrenchment along its northern border. Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes on targets in government-controlled parts of Syria in recent years \u2014 but rarely acknowledges them. Since the beginning of 2023, Syrian officials have attributed a dozen strikes on Syrian territory to Israel, the latest of which came early Tuesday and put the international airport of the northern city of Aleppo out of service.
\n\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Iran\u2019s president Ebrahim Raisi arrives in Syria for rare meeting with Bashar Assad.Tehran has been a main backer of President Bashar Assad\u2019s government since an…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6480,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6479\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}