Syria’s Assad stages carefully choreographed tour of earthquake damage
that hit Turkey and Syria, Syrian President Bashar Assad on Friday pointedly shamed the West for shunning his country.
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.
“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. 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.Assad’s closest allies, Russia, Iran and China, all sent aid after the disaster. But so did key U.S. Arab allies, notably the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Jordan.
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