Egypt speaker, Arab lawmakers visit Syrian President Assad

Egypt’s parliament speaker headed a Mideast delegation Sunday on a visit to Syria for talks with President Bashar Assad. The trip follows a mini-summit in Baghdad that affirmed the Arab League’s intentions of bringing Syria back into the region’s fold despite the country’s devastating civil war.
Speaker Hanafy el-Gebaly is the most senior Egyptian official to visit Syria in over a decade, after most Arab countries cut ties with Assad. Syria was suspended from the Arab League in 2011 after Assad’s government cracked down brutally on mass protests against his rule – an uprising that quickly descended into a brutal civil war.
Syria’s conflict has killed over 300,000 people and displaced half the country’s population of 23 million.
Palestinian and Lebanese lawmakers accompanied el-Gebaly on the visit, which followed the meeting of the Arab Inter-Parliamentary Union on Saturday in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. They were to be joined by other Arab lawmakers later in the day.