{"id":441434,"date":"2025-05-17T09:37:57","date_gmt":"2025-05-17T06:37:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/?p=441434"},"modified":"2025-05-17T09:37:57","modified_gmt":"2025-05-17T06:37:57","slug":"arab-league-summit-kicks-off-in-baghdad-with-gaza-at-the-top-of-the-agenda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/arab-league-summit-kicks-off-in-baghdad-with-gaza-at-the-top-of-the-agenda\/","title":{"rendered":"Arab League summit kicks off in Baghdad with Gaza at the top of the agenda"},"content":{"rendered":"

BAGHDAD (SONNA) \u2014 Regional leaders were to meet in Baghdad on Saturday at the annual summit of the Arab League, with the war in Gaza<\/span>\u00a0expected to once again loom large.<\/p>\n

In March, at an emergency summit in Cairo,\u00a0Arab leaders endorsed a proposed plan for reconstruction<\/span>\u00a0of the Gaza Strip without displacing its roughly 2 million residents.<\/p>\n

Saturday\u2019s summit comes two months after after Israel ended a ceasefire reached with the Hamas militant group in January. In recent days, Israel has launched widespread attacks in Gaza and\u00a0Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu<\/span>\u00a0has vowed a further escalation of force to pursue his aim of destroying Hamas.<\/p>\n

The Baghdad meeting was upstaged by U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s tour in the region earlier in the week. Trump\u2019s visit did not usher in a deal for a new ceasefire in Gaza as many had hoped, but he grabbed headlines by\u00a0meeting with new Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa<\/span>\u00a0\u2014 who had once fought against U.S. forces in Iraq \u2014 and promising to remove U.S. sanctions imposed on Syria.<\/p>\n

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Al-Sharaa was not attending the summit in Baghdad<\/span>, where Syria\u2019s delegation was headed by Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shibani. Iraqi Shiite militias and political factions are wary of al-Sharaa\u2019s past as a Sunni militant and had pushed back against his invitation to the summit.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Formerly known by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Golani, al-Sharaa joined the ranks of al-Qaida insurgents battling U.S. forces in Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 to oust\u00a0Saddam Hussein<\/span> and still faces a warrant for his arrest on terrorism charges in Iraq.<\/p>\n

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During Syria\u2019s conflict that began in March 2011, several Iraqi Shiite militias fought alongside the forces of former Syrian President Bashar Assad, making al-Sharaa today a particularly sensitive figure for them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Iraq, which has strong \u2014 and sometimes conflicting \u2014 ties with both the United States and Iran, has sought to strike a difficult balance between them and to position itself as a regional mediator.<\/p>\n

An Iraqi political official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment, said that Iran\u2019s Quds Force commander Esmail Ghaani had paid a visit to Baghdad prior to the summit and \u201cconveyed messages of support for the Iranian-American negotiations\u201d for a nuclear deal<\/span>\u00a0and a demand for the lifting of crippling sanctions on Iran.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Source: AP<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BAGHDAD (SONNA) \u2014 Regional leaders were to meet in Baghdad on Saturday at the annual summit of the Arab League, with the war in Gaza\u00a0expected to once again loom large. In March, at an emergency summit in Cairo,\u00a0Arab leaders endorsed a proposed plan for reconstruction\u00a0of the Gaza Strip without displacing its roughly 2 million residents. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":120,"featured_media":441435,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-441434","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/120"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=441434"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441434\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":441436,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441434\/revisions\/441436"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/441435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=441434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=441434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonna.so\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=441434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}