On his first public visit touring the destruction wreaked by this week’s deadly earthquake that hit Turkey and Syria, Syrian President Bashar Assad on Friday pointedly shamed the West for shunning his country.
The embattled president may see the disaster, which shattered much of northern Syria, as an opportunity to push for an easing of his country’s isolation — if not from the United States and the European Union, which have enforced sanctions for years over the long, brutal civil war, then from Arab nations.
