Top Democrat knocks UAE’s welcome for ‘brutal murderer Assad’

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) issued a sharp rebuke to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Sunday, two days after Syrian President Bashar Assad’s official visit to the Arab country.

Tweeting from the Foreign Affairs Committee account, Meeks quoted a report by The Associated Press detailing the Syrian president’s visit to the emirates and said he was “deeply disappointed by the UAE” and referred to Assad as a “brutal murderer.”

“Deeply disappointed by the UAE welcoming brutal murderer Assad for his first visit to an Arab state since 2011, the very week Syria’s uprising began,” Meeks said via the tweet on Sunday.

He added that Assad’s “heinous slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians must not be forgotten.”

The New York Democrat’s comments come just days after the U.S. State Department said it was “profoundly disappointed and troubled” by Assad’s official visit to the UAE.

“We urge states considering engagement with the Assad regime to weigh carefully the horrific atrocities visited by the regime on the Syrians over the last decade, as well as the regime’s continuing efforts to deny much of the country access to humanitarian aid and security,” State Department spokesperson Ned Price said, according to Reuters.

Price added that the trip was an “apparent attempt to legitimize” Assad.

Assad’s visit last week was his first to an Arab state since the Syrian war began in 2011.

The Syrian president, who has long been an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, had previously traveled to only Russia and Iran since the Syrian war.

The meeting comes a decade after the war that started with an uprising against Assad’s rule and spiraled into the world’s biggest refugee crisis as the Syrian president crushed the opposition and dissidents with Russian support.