TUNIS (Middle East Eye) –
Tunisia and Syria will be strengthening their diplomatic ties, President Kais Saied has announced.
Tunisia cut off diplomatic relations with Syria about a decade ago, following the start of the foreign-backed insurgency in Syria in 2011. Tunisia returned a limited diplomatic mission to Syria in 2017.
At a meeting in Carthage Palace on Thursday, Saied and Nabil Ammar, the new minister of foreign affairs, decided to raise the level of Tunisian diplomatic representation in Damascus.
Saied said in a statement following a meeting with his country’s foreign affairs minister that the issue of the Syrian conflict was an internal affair that concerned only the Syrian people.
Tunis and Damascus severed diplomatic relations almost a decade ago.
Tunisia began limited diplomatic links with Syria in 2017, in part to help track more than 3,000 Tunisian militants reportedly fighting in Syria.
However, since Saied took the helm in 2021 and consolidated his power, Tunis has been sending Damascus signals that it is ready to resume full diplomatic ties with it.
Several other Arab countries, including Egypt, Jordan, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, in the past months, have sent similar signals, indicating that they too are prepared to resume ambassador-level diplomatic ties with the Syrian government.
The foreign-backed insurgency, which started in Syria in 2011, became a platform for the Daesh forces, and other western-backed terrorist groups, to wreak havoc in the Arab country, and beyond its borders, particularly in Iraq.
Eventually, defense forces mobilized from Iran, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan were able to overpower the Daesh forces and push the terrorist forces out of the region.