Walid Jumblatt, the leader of Lebanon's Druze and head of the Progressive Socialist Party, is on his way to visit Damascus with the new leadership, according to a report in the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar.
Jumblatt has a complex position in his relationship with Syria and the regime of Bashar al-Assad, after his father, Hafez al-Assad, sent emissaries to assassinate his father, Kamel Jumblatt, in the 1970s.
For several decades, Jumblatt had a relationship with Damascus out of necessity. He knew the importance of the Levant in the Arab world, and understood that Lebanon had a special relationship with Damascus, regardless of the identity of its ruler.
However, it was noted that his complex relationship with Bashar al-Assad tired him and constituted an obstacle. Bashar al-Assad, for his part, was also not friendly with Jumblatt, and therefore worked to strengthen the influence of his Druze opponents in Lebanon and Syria.
After the outbreak of the crisis in Syria, Jumblatt unhesitatingly sided with Assad's opponents. He preferred secular opposition figures or those who lived abroad, but in the first stage he had to communicate with Islamic organizations in order to deal with the situation of the Druze in the Idlib area.
Jumblatt's biggest concession in the past four years was his call for a general and comprehensive settlement in Syria, while normalizing relations with Assad on a personal level. Therefore, when Damascus fell to the rebels, Jumblatt was the first to welcome the great change. He wanted to help the Syrian Druze stay inside Syria.
