Time to Permanently End Sanctions on Syria
Instituted to prevent "economic reconstruction," crippling economic sanctions imposed on Syria by the U.S. only exacerbate the current earthquake crisis and economic troubles the Syrian people face.
The immense and overwhelming devastation wrought by the destructive earthquakes in Turkey and Syria is truly staggering to behold. At the time of this writing, Turkey has suffered over 24,000 deaths as a result of the catastrophe. Syria, on the other hand, has lost about 3,500 people to the natural disaster, with roughly 2,100 losses in rebel-held areas and 1,400 deaths in government-held territories.
Amid the devastation, the Biden administration still maintains its policy of levying crippling economic sanctions on Syria aimed at preventing Syria’s economic reconstruction after a brutal decade-long civil war between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government and American-backed jihadist insurgencies, which consisted of terrorist groups directly attached to Al Qaeda and oftentimes, Al Qaeda itself.
The official policy of the United States regarding Syria, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in October 2021, “is to oppose the reconstruction of Syria.” Moreover, Blinken stated that the U.S. will not change its “position to oppose the reconstruction of Syria until there is irreversible progress toward a political solution.” In essence, the “political solution” means regime change in Damascus and the removal of Assad from power.
A few years before, in 2019, senior U.S. official Dana Stroul contemptuously boasted that most of Syria is “rubble” due to the results of the war and added that the U.S. can “hold the line on preventing reconstruction” through the use of “preventing reconstruction aid and technical expertise” from entering Syria.
Ultimately, the sanctions and economic warfare hurt innocent Syrian civilians the most. When UN special rapporteur Alena Douhan made a 12-day visit to Syria in November 2022, she detailed the immense economic hardships the Syrian people face and immediately called for an end to Washington’s sanctions that only exacerbate the humanitarian problems in Syria.
Upon returning from the trip, Douhan stated that she was “struck” by the effect the sanctions had on Syria’s humanitarian crises, reporting that the economic warfare has contributed massively to the current troubles experienced by the Syrian people. According to Douhan, a whopping ninety percent of Syria’s population is “currently living below the poverty line, with limited access to food, water, electricity, shelter, fuel, transportation and healthcare.”
Due to much of Syria’s infrastructure being destroyed as a result of Washington’s proxy war, sanctions have made it unimaginably difficult to adequately rebuild the war-torn nation. Douhan explains:
With more than half of the vital infrastructure either completely destroyed or severely damaged, the imposition of unilateral sanctions on key economic sectors, including oil, gas, electricity, trade, construction and engineering have quashed national income, and undermine efforts towards economic recovery and reconstruction.
U.S. sanctions against Syria reached their height in the past few years when the Caesar Act was signed into law in 2019, along with the recent Captagon Act swiftly passing through Congress. The latter of which was erroneously passed as a pretext to “combat the Syrian regime’s drug trade,” thus obscuring the real intentions behind the act: increasing sanctions on Syria and increasing pressure on the Assad regime in the hopes of enacting a change in power.
In addition to repressive sanctions, U.S. forces and American-backed militants occupy a third of the country, where there are critical agricultural areas and oil reserves. By plundering its natural resources and stealing the country’s oil and wheat, Washington is, in effect, destroying Syria. An article in The Cradle titled “Syria under the American whip: Sanctions that kill”, elucidates the enormous detrimental effect this has on Syria:
Damascus is thus subjected to a double stranglehold by depriving it of its oil (the main source of foreign exchange). Energy sales constitute about a quarter of Syria’s export earnings, and covers 90 percent of its domestic market needs. Before the war, in 2010, Syria produced 4 million tons of wheat, a strategic agricultural staple which provides food self-sufficiency and domestic sustenance, about a quarter of which is then exported.
Today, the country has not only lost access to its vital agricultural lands, but western sanctions prevent Damascus from importing these essential staples to feed its population.
This has exacerbated the effects of the blockade on the Syrian people, who are currently going through one of the most severe living, economic, and health crises in their modern history, and are left unable to secure basic daily needs of bread and medicine.
Stealing Syria’s oil, occupying roughly a third of the country in which there are large swaths of essential agricultural fields and oil resources, funding proxy jihadist insurgencies to weaken Assad, and leveraging destructive sanctions that directly prevent Syria from reconstructing economically, has clearly generated a more devastating and bleaker world for the everyday Syrian.
The calamity that has been brought about by the earthquake crisis has seen renewed enthusiasm for terminating sanctions against Syria from international organizations, political figures, and church leaders. In the wake of the earthquakes, three prominent Christian leaders within Syria immediately called for lifting sanctions, expressing in a letter that the natural disaster only “adds to the ordeal of the Syrian people” and stressed the need to end “unjust sanctions” imposed on Syria.
“We, the three patriarchs with the heads of churches in Syria, demand from the United Nations and the countries imposing sanctions on Syria to lift the embargo and unjust sanctions imposed on the Syrian people, and to take exceptional measures and immediate initiatives to secure the delivery of the much-needed relief and humanitarian aid,” a portion of the letter read.
To some credit, the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued a temporary waiver on Friday of Ceasar Act sanctions to allow humanitarian aid and earthquake relief funds to enter the country to much surprise, after many U.S. officials downplayed any idea of lifting sanctions, even temporarily. At the same time, the majority of crippling sanctions currently in place will remain permanently until a major policy reversal regarding relations with Assad.
It’s time to get out of Syria.
Washington’s dirty proxy war against Assad was wholly unnecessary from the beginning, waged with the mindset of enacting regime change in a much larger operation to weaken Iran’s influence in the Middle East. D.C.’s siding with and empowerment of Al Qaeda during the war is abhorrent and a blatant betrayal of the American people. Over the past decade, the American empire’s interference and malpractice regarding the war in Syria have drawn in major adversaries to the battlefield to fight these D.C.-backed insurgencies and defend Bashar al-Assad’s government from crumbling: Russia and Iran.
There are two things neocon interventionists within the Biden administration need to understand about Syria and Assad: 1) There are no core American interests in pursuing regime change, nor are there any in levying sanctions, which ultimately only hurt innocent civilians. 2) Assad isn’t going anywhere, and his regime isn’t going to collapse anytime soon. He wields the vast majority of the support of the Syrian people in the territories his government occupies. Adding to that, American government adversaries such as Russia and Iran will not let Assad’s destruction happen, most likely fearing the rise in power of Al Qaeda-linked terrorist groups.
Insufferable interventionists within the prior four administrations have long sought the removal of Assad from power. Short of an all-out war waged by the U.S., funding militant insurgencies, the deployment of economic sanctions, and coercing other nations to refuse to normalize relations with Damascus are, to them, a preferable pathway to regime change.
As stated before, there are no core American interests in pursuing the destruction of Syria. The repressive sanctions are entirely unnecessary and only harm the innocent. The earthquakes reinforce the need to end them. It’s time to get out of Syria, permanently end the economic warfare, and focus on solving our problems here at home.