Arab League votes to readmit Syria as members begin to normalise ties with President Assad

The decision was taken at a closed meeting of Arab government representatives at the league’s headquarters in the Egyptian capital Cairo, said Gamal Roshdy, spokesman for the alliance’s secretary general.

The Arab League was founded in 1945 and is a loose alliance of nearly two dozen Arab countries that have pledged to cooperate on matters including economic and military affairs.

Syria’s membership of the league was suspended in 2011 as a civil war broke out which has led to the deaths of more than half a million people, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has said.

The civil war is ongoing but the Assad regime, which has been accused of using chemical weapons on the Syrian people, is widely considered to have won the conflict.