From tinned food to Captagon: Syria’s Saudi connection
30. October 2026
Nine decades after a future Syrian president helped broker peace in Yemen, Ahmed al-Sharaa’s embrace of Riyadh raises the prospect of a very different Syrian role.
King Abdulaziz proclaimed the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932. Its borders remained unfinished business. Two years later, disputes over Asir and Najran brought war with Yemen’s Mutawakkilite kingdom.
Crown Prince Saud, who would succeed his father in 1953, commanded troops against Prince Ahmad, son of Imam Yahya. Saud’s half-brother Faisal, who would depose him in 1964, led another front. Faisal was preparing to advance from Hodeidah towards Sanaa when Abdulaziz accepted the imam’s request for a truce.
Foreign powers weighed on the king’s calculations: Italy had considerable influence in Yemen; France held neighbouring French Somaliland, today’s Djibouti. Britain’s intentions remained uncertain. It controlled Aden, southern protectorates and strategic islands, including Perim at the entrance to the Bab al-Mandab strait and Socotra.
Tinned food and Ottoman officers
Negotiations opened in Taif under an Arab mediation committee led by Egypt’s Muhammad Ali Allouba Pasha and Shukri al-Quwatli, Syria’s future president. Quwatli was then a leading figure in the National Bloc and chairman of the Damascus cannery he had founded that was doing brisk trade with Saudi Arabia. At its opening in 1934, he delivered a celebrated speech championing Syrian industry.
Imam Yahya stalled. He summoned Ali Said Pasha, the Ottoman commander in Yemen during the First World War, who hurried to Saada to join Prince Ahmad’s forces. Another former Ottoman officer, Colonel Ali Fahmi Bey, followed. Saudi commanders warned that the imam was exploiting the truce to import arms and ammunition.
After a military parade in Taif and dinner with the mediators, Abdulaziz issued an ultimatum: fulfil the terms by the end of May 29, 1934. The imam yielded and signed the treaty, settling the frontier.
A railway and a “dissolute” government
On pilgrimage in 1937, Quwatli reached an agreement with Abdulaziz to restore the Hejaz railway between Damascus and Medina. He was then Syria’s defence and finance minister, serving under President Hashim al-Atassi and Prime Minister Jamil Mardam Bey.
France’s newly elected Socialist-led government had pursued an independence treaty with Syria, then retreated. During Quwatli’s absence, Mardam Bey pushed through contentious economic agreements, including French oil-exploration contracts. Quwatli resigned. The poet Omar Abu Risha captured the ensuing fury in “The Bride”, describing the government as a “dissolute divorcée”.
Some nine decades later, Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government would use another Abu Risha poem, “For Glory and the Homeland”, as an unofficial national anthem. The new order established on December 8, 2024 marked a sweeping reversal of the hostility that had characterised Bashar al-Assad’s relations with Arab states, particularly the Gulf monarchies.
Syria renewed ties with the Gulf, Jordan and even Iraq, placing Saudi Arabia at the centre of its diplomacy. Sharaa’s birth in Riyadh in 1982, while his father worked in the Saudi oil industry, lends this return to Syria’s “natural” geopolitical setting a personal touch. He has picked up the Syrian-Saudi thread of which Quwatli was a principal custodian.
Elite troops for Yemen?
Saudi Arabia helped secure international acceptance for Sharaa and his government. It arranged his first, awkward yet enthusiastic meeting with Donald Trump, setting in motion the dismantling of sanctions and, eventually, permission to import American weapons.
The parallels with 1934 are intriguing. Yemen’s king sought help from Turkish officers; weeks ago, Turkey and Pakistan announced a defensive alliance with Saudi Arabia. Assad’s government allowed the Houthis to use Yemen’s embassy in Damascus. Now reports suggest thousands of Syrian fighters could deploy to Yemen alongside Saudi allies, coinciding with Sharaa’s latest Riyadh meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Jordanian writer Hisham Ghanem draws a provocative comparison between the Houthis and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which led Assad’s overthrow alongside other Islamist factions. He likens Assad’s order to Yemen’s Saudi-backed governing establishment.
Why has one armed Islamist leader become an internationally recognised president and Saudi ally, while another Islamist movement faces a Saudi-led war, potentially with Syrian participation?
Such questions unsettle familiar assumptions about rebellion and legitimacy. They also overlook Assad’s wider position. His regime was a “savage state”, in the words of French scholar Michel Seurat, who was kidnapped by Hezbollah and killed in 1986. It was also inherently antagonistic towards the Arab, regional and international order.
One final comparison suggests itself. Quwatli built a cannery. Syria’s departed rulers scattered drug factories across the country, fighting neighbouring states, Saudi Arabia among them, to get their Captagon pills through.
