gotchanewsdaily.com 
“The situation in the Middle East has completely changed the discussion,” the EU diplomat said, referring to the current war in Lebanon.
Assad’s charm offensive
President Assad’s government, for its part, is eager to return to the embrace of its neighbors and other global leaders. In 2023, he received a hug from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at a meeting of Arab leaders in Saudi Arabia (the country initially backed some Syrian rebels), which he attended for the first time in over a decade.
He has led a charm offensive for years, telling Syrians who fled it is now safe to return. In 2016, Assad told a group of Russian journalists, “We encourage every Syrian to come back to Syria.”
More recently, Syria has been bankrolling a campaign by Western influencers to clean up his country’s image and jumpstart tourism, which has been largely dead for a decade.
But officials have not mapped out how such a shift to normalizing ties might happen. “There is no one who says: we will pick up the phone to call Assad,” said one EU official. “Nobody dares to raise that, but it is a hidden suggestion by some.”
In July, seven EU countries (Austria, Italy, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Greece, Croatia and Cyprus) called on the EU’s foreign policy chief to review the EU’s strategy for Syria. The goal, they said, was to improve the humanitarian situation in Syria as well as help return migrants to certain regions of the country.
