TUNIS, March 3 — Tunisia severed ties with Syria during the Arab Spring to protest the Assad government’s brutal crackdown against the opposition. President Kais Saied has now pledged to revoke this decision.
Previous month, Tunisian President Kais Saied has confirmed he plans to restore diplomatic ties with Syria, more than a decade after they were broken off in protest of Damascus’s repression of political opponents. Today, in a meeting with foreign minister Nabil Ammar, the president ordered to appoint an ambassador to Damascus.
A Change in Direction
Tunisia has long been hailed as one of the few success stories of the Arab Spring after protesters overthrew authoritarian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and ushered in democratic elections.
In 2012, the country expelled Syria’s ambassador in protest of Assad’s suppression of pro-democracy demonstrations that emerged during the Arab Spring. This repression escalated into an ongoing civil war.
In 2017, Tunisia reopened a diplomatic mission in Syria with a limited mission to monitor more than 3,000 Tunisian militants fighting in Syria.
Kais Saied, who took power in 2019, said on Friday that the “question of the regime in Syria concerns only the Syrians.”
