Walid al-Muallem, Syria’s longstanding foreign minister, became the irascible face of the defensive, authoritarian regime of President Bashar al-Assad during the country’s near decade of gruelling civil war.
Seen by diplomats as a professional who never deviated from the party line, the top foreign official, who has died aged 79, became less visible as the bloody conflict wore on through the 2010s. As peace negotiations between regime and opposition forces collapsed, Syria’s pariah status solidified and Russia, Iran and Turkey increasingly began calling the shots, Muallem seemed an immovable regime stalwart. Yet “loyal or not loyal, it’s like saying a believer or a non-believer,” observed Bassam Barabandi, a former Syrian diplomat who defected in 2013. “We cannot know his mind.”
Muallem was born in 1941, son of a traditional Damascene Sunni family considered to be from “inside the walls” — an expression referring to the capital’s walled old…