Al-Assad to visit Russia and China

Well informed sources in Damascus said that the Syrian foreign minister Farouk al-Shara will set with the Russian officials a fixed date for the expected visit of President Bashar al-Assad this summer to Moscow, in a work trip expected before the end of the month..

President al-Assad will meet with Vladimir Putin for the first time and will be the first Syrian president to visit Russia since the visit of his late father Hafez al-Assad who visited Russia by the end of the 1980s.

However, al-Assad's visit to Peking will be the first for a Syrian President since decades, despite the fact that Damascus "preserved the line of understanding with the two countries through reciprocated visits headed by the Syrian side by vice- President Abdul Halim Khaddam." Khaddam had visited Moscow and met with the Russian President in 2003 and visited Peking two years before that.

In his two visit, al-Assad is expected to concentrate on "economic cooperation " and studying "the two diverse experiences in political and economic openness of the two major states."