Jordan working on 'Arab-led process' to end Syria war, says foreign minister

Jordan is gathering regional and international support to help end the 11-year-old conflict in Syria in a process led by Arab nations, Jordanian Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Affairs Minister Ayman Safadi has claimed.

Amman, which has normalised ties with the brutal Assad regime, is advocating for "a collective Arab role"  to end the war, "in co-ordination with our friends and partners", Safadi told UAE outlet The National on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York.

"We've got, as Arabs, to assume our role in efforts to bring an end to the Syrian catastrophe," he said.

"There's been no real process to address that crisis in the past few years, it's been status quo politics, and we cannot live with status quo politics."

Despite these claims, the Assad regime has repeatedly hampered or walked out of international efforts to bring peace to Syria, including recent constitution talks. 

Assad has also continuously stated that he is seeking a military solution to end the war in Syria.

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Jordan hosts nearly 800,000 Syrian refugees according to UN numbers, although the actual figure is believed to be above a million, and has sought to return them to their home country, which is almost universally viewed as "unsafe".

"The devastating consequences of the Syrian crisis continues ... Refugees are not going back, the economy is suffering and millions of Syrians are living under the poverty line," he added.

Other countries surrounding Syria – such as its much smaller neighbour Lebanon – also host very large numbers of refugees and have begun talking about facilitating their return, amid deep divide over the issue.

Human rights groups and others say returnees face death from forces conscription, detention, or fighting.

The Jordanian and Syrian foreign ministers discussed this last week in New York.

Back in 2018, Safadi said that Jordan had "exceeded its absorptive capacity" for hosting refugees.

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The foreign minister explained that UN Resolutions 2254 and 2642 would be the foundation for any Arab-led peace process, which would lay out a roadmap for a negotiated settlement.

The Syrian regime has repeatedly ducked out of other peace settlements based on 2254, which could ultimately end the Assad dynasty's five-decade rule of the country.

Safadi also expressed his concerns with regards to the shared border with Syria, which has seen a spur of violence in recent years due to the smuggling of narcotics after Amman normalised ties with Damascus and opened border crossings.

"We want to see under [UN Resolution] 2642 how we can really accelerate the early recovery projects. We’re extremely concerned with the situation in the south [of Syria]. We need stability in the south, and the drug trafficking threat is a major threat to us," he said.

Early this year, Jordan announced tighter modifications to its border crackdown regulations following a dramatic uptick in drugs smuggling and infiltration operations - particularly from neighbouring Syria and Iraq.

Captagon, an amphetamine, is one of the main drugs smuggled across Jordan border and into the Gulf. In 2020, exports from Syria reached a market value of at least $3.46bn @plato010 examines the drug war unfolding on the Jordanian-Syrian border ⬇ https://t.co/fGVi7Tnp08

— The New Arab (@The_NewArab) March 4, 2022

Dozens of drug smugglers have also been killed during Jordanian military operations on the border to counter the spread of captagon.

Safadi sounded optimistic that the US would not stand in the way of such a process, despite Washington saying it was opposed to normalisation with the "brutal Bashar al-Assad regime" in Damascus.

"I can safely say that everybody wants to see an end to this crisis. And everybody is open to any mechanism that can deliver an end to this crisis," he said, adding that hurdles such as US objection could be overcome.

Countries in the region - including Jordan, the UAE and Bahrain - have in recent years worked to mend ties with the Syrian regime, cut off since the onset of the war in 2011 when regime forces brutally cracked down on pro-democracy demonstrations.