On February 27, the Qatari-owned Al-Quds al-Arabi daily carried the following lead editorial: “The “business trip” conducted by President of the Syrian regime Bashar al-Assad to Tehran, along with his meeting with Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, was required to achieve certain objectives, namely give the impression that Iran is stable despite the suffocating American sanctions, and that Al-Assad is further exiting the bottleneck, eight years after the popular uprising against his regime. The official media outlets in Tehran and Damascus made sure to convey a positive and celebratory climate, thus quoting Khamenei as describing Al-Assad as “the hero of the Arab world,” and complementing the “victories that addressed harsh blows to the Western and American project in the region.”

“They also shed light on Rouhani’s statement in which he said: “Syria’s victory is a victory for Iran and the entire Islamic nation,” and on Al-Assad’s assurance that the relations between Tehran and Damascus were a “key factor in Syria’s and Iran’s resilience in the face of the plots of the hostile states, seeking to weaken both countries.” But all that did not to conceal another facet of the visit, which exposed the falsehood of, and contradicted the stability and victory claims… Indeed, the victorious and stable side does not conduct an unannounced visit in advance, which is only revealed once it is completed, without there being a prominent delegation accompanying the head of the regime on his first visit to Tehran since October 2010, and without the regime’s flag being raised during Al-Assad’s meeting with his Iranian counterpart.

“On the other hand, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif’s resignation further exposed the deceiving appearances, whether in form, as the resignation was announced through a message on Instagram, not in an official letter to the Iranian presidency, or in content, as Zarif said in his statement: “The lethal poison for foreign policy is for it to become a matter of conflict between parties and factions.” And regardless of the connection between Zarif’s resignation and Al-Assad’s visit to Tehran, the official photos of the reception of the head of the Syrian regime reflected the absence of the man of diplomacy and politics, i.e. Zarif, and the presence of the man of the Quds Force and war, i.e. Qasem Soleimani. If only the Syrian regime’s flag was the one sovereign symbol missing from Al-Assad’s rare visits to Russia and Iran…

“As coincidence would have it, Moscow leaked new photos of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to the Khmeimim Air Base in Syria at the end of 2017, showing Al-Assad in a corner in the background, standing alongside a Russian officer. This is why it was funny to hear Al-Assad urging the regional governments to stop succumbing to the wills of foreign powers while he was in Tehran, to whose Revolutionary Guard and militias he surrendered Syria’s keys… Finally, let this visit be a lesson to the regimes rushing to normalize the relations with Al-Assad’s regime and reopen their embassies in Damascus under the pretext of blocking the way ahead of Iran’s influence in Syria…”