Overlooked by a portrait of President Bashar al-Assad and offering sticky sweets, a Syrian tourism booth in Dubai is trying to seize on an emerging rapprochement with Arab states to win back Gulf tourists it lost during more than a decade of war.
"We are now aiming to regain the tourism income from (Gulf Cooperation Council countries) to Syria. We used to have millions of our friends and brothers from GCC countries in Syria, especially in summer," Nedal Machfej, Syria's deputy tourism minister, told Reuters at the Arabian Travel Market exhibition in Dubai.
