Time to lift sanctions on Syria?

Wide-ranging international sanctions made it a crime to work with Syria’s former government. But should it be a crime to work with the new one?

That’s a question aid organizations, civil society groups and Syrian ex-pats have been asking since a coalition of rebel groups toppled the authoritarian Assad regime last month.

Syria has long been one of the most sanctioned countries in the world because of the Assad family, which headed the government there for 54 years.

But after ousting the regime in early December, Syrian rebels assembled a caretaker government, and that government inherited all of the sanctions placed on the previous Syrian government.

Those sanctions prevent Syria from making deals to import wheat or fuel, the caretaker government’s new finance minister told Reuters news agency this week.

Syria’s new foreign minister also brought up the sanctions while visiting Qatar last week. “We reiterate our calls for the US to lift these sanctions, which have now become against the Syrian people,” Foreign Minister Asaad Shaibani said.

If sanctions are not lifted, both politicians said, the country faces catastrophe.

Experts tend to agree. “Syria is in deep economic peril and the transition risks being thrown off course if that collapse — a trajectory exacerbated by Western sanctions — continues,” confirmed Julien Barnes-Dacey, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Affairs (ECFR).

Afghanistan, after the Taliban took power in 2021, provides an example of what not to do, experts from Crisis Group think tank, wrote in Foreign Policy magazine last week.

“Outside actors seem poised to repeat many of the same mistakes they made in Afghanistan after the Taliban’s takeover,” they argued. Western governments “left in place economic punishments that had no moderating effect on the Taliban but [instead] … dealt a blow to the [Taliban’s] pragmatic wing, empowering hard-liners during the regime’s precarious first months.”

A little relief

On Monday, the US government seemed to move towards a change in its Syria sanction policy in the form of what’s known as a “general license.” While it doesn’t actually lift sanctions, it provides some exceptions to them.

General License 24, issued by the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, runs for six months and allows “transactions with Syrian government entities” as well as transactions related to fuel and power supplies and “non-commercial personal remittances” through the Central Bank of Syria. The latter is usually defined as including personal cash transfers and wages.

The general license comes on top of “humanitarian exceptions” previously adopted by the United Nations, the EU and US after an earthquake that hit northern Syria and Turkey in 2023.

The license can be seen as a “partial victory,” according to the Washington-based American Coalition for Syria (ACS), a group of advocacy organizations that lobbied for sanctions relief.

It “is a step in the right direction,” ACS policy officer Sameer Saboungi said in a statement sent to DW. But his organization will continue pushing for the eventual rollback of the whole sanctions regime on Syria, he added.

Syrian sanctions, deep and wide

The US first designated Syria “a State Sponsor of Terrorism” in 1979 because of how its government supported US-designated terrorist groups. In 2004, Washington added more sanctions and export restrictions due to Syrian activities in neighboring Lebanon. Then after 2011, when the Assad regime began to brutally repress anti-government demonstrations, even more sanctions were added due to its use of chemical weapons, human rights abuses and drug trafficking.

The European Union has sanctioned Syria since 2005 and also increased restrictions when civil war broke out in 2011.

Additionally, the rebel group that led December’s offensive, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham or HTS, is also sanctioned because it is designated a terror group by many countries, due to past links with extremists like al-Qaeda.

Will general license help?

It is possible that the US general license may not be very effective, experts say. This is because many organizations — like banks, for example — tend towards what is known as “over-compliance.” Fearing secondary sanctions or different interpretations of the rules in the future, they are more cautious since failure to adhere to sanctions could lead to billions in fines.

There are also other complications. Despite the general license, any person or organization working with HTS could still be liable for prosecution “for providing material support for terrorists.” HTS leader Ahmad al-Sharaa has previously said his group will be dissolved, which could partially settle this issue.

Additionally, some Syria sanctions “apply to specific institutions that any interim or successor regime is likely to keep in place,” experts Scott Anderson and Alex Zerden wrote in a mid-December analysis for media outlet Lawfare. For example, the Central Bank of Syria is sanctioned and obviously can’t simply be dissolved, they wrote.

How to get sanctions lifted

The other worrying aspect of sanctions on Syria is that, so far at least, it’s unclear when and how the new transitional government can get further relief.

Last week, senior European diplomats — German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and her French counterpart Jean-Noel Barrot — visited Syria and met with HTS members.

The Europeans’ trip to Damascus was “a very positive initial step,” the ECFR’s Barnes-Dacey said. But, he added, during their visit, the diplomats seemed to have a fairly narrow focus.

“My wider concern with the trip was that the messaging was very fixed on how the Syrians need to get everything right to unlock support,” he said, adding that there was “very little attention on how Europeans can actively support Syrians in meeting current challenges. There is clearly a lot of justifiable European hesitation … but if Europeans and the US move too slowly, they risk undermining the already fragile transition process,” he warned.

As others have put it on social media, sanctions relief is needed so Syria’s caretaker government can achieve what the EU and US want, rather than the other way around.

Barnes-Dacey said he believes now that the US has offered some sanctions relief, the EU may follow.

Germany is considering this question and there are currently talks about sanctions at the EU level, the German Foreign Ministry told DW in an e-mailed statement.

“We are actively discussing ways in which we can relieve sanctions on the Syrian population in certain sectors,” the statement said.

However, the German Foreign Ministry added that sanctions relief and questions about delisting HTS as a terrorist organization can only be done unanimously at the EU level.

Edited by: Sean M. Sinico