In a strange turn of events, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has come out in defense of Donald Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban”.
While Trump’s executive order on immigration, signed at the end of last month, sparked mass protests and opposition in America, responses in the Arab world were - unexpectedly - more mixed.
The head of Dubai’s security made headlines when he posted a series of tweets defending America’s right to “protect its security from anyone who could be dangerous for the safety of its people.”
The Emirati Foreign Minister later backed him up, saying that the travel ban on citizens of seven Muslim-majority nations is not anti-Islam.
Unlike the UAE, Syria is directly targeted by the ban on two levels: both as one of the nations singled out by the document, and as an exporter of large numbers of refugees from its ongoing civil war. Entry to all refugees was to be suspended for three months under the legislation.
This did not stop Syria's contested dictator from telling French channel TF1 on Tuesday that Trump’s travel ban is “not against the Syrian people.”
“It’s against the terrorists that would infiltrate some of the immigrants to the West. And that happened. It happened in Europe, mainly in Germany,” he claimed.
“I think the aim of Trump is to prevent those people from coming,” he added, declining to indicate whether he felt the US President’s immigration policy was the right one.
It is not entirely surprising that Assad should be so unmoved by the fate of Syrian refugees. After all, the majority of the estimated 4.9 million Syrians currently displaced outside the country are supporters of the opposition, who have fled from regime violence.
In spite of Assad’s words of support, Trump is currently fighting court rulings which suspended his executive order earlier this month. Appeal court judges last week upheld a Seattle judge’s decision to freeze the executive order, pushing Trump to threaten that he might rewrite it in an attempt to get it reinstated.
While Trump has not yet set out a clear policy with regard to Syria, could Assad’s warm words reflect potential for an improvement in the regime's relations with Washington, as the new President attempts to establish warmer ties with Damascus’ closest ally Russia?
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