Keeping Sanctions on Syria Makes No Sense
US and European governments are refusing to lift sanctions on Syria, punishing its people for a situation that is out of their control even though the intended target of the sanctions, Bashar al-Assad, is out of the picture.
Syrians receive humanitarian aid on December 16, 2024, in Aleppo, Syria. (Burak Kara / Getty Images)
The US government originally put sanctions on Syria as punishment for dictator Bashar al-Assad, his autocratic rule, and his brutalization of his own people. In practice, however, these sanctions primarily crushed the ordinary Syrians they were ostensibly meant to protect. So, with Assad finally gone, you would think now would be the ideal time to finally lift them.
Nope. It was simply “too early” to make that move, a host of US lawmakers said days ago, echoing — or, more accurately, steering — the statements of European officials, who are likewise refusing to end sanctions until they see that the incoming government is on its best behavior. At issue, these Western officials said, was the victorious Syrian rebels’ history of extremism and their terrorist backgrounds, and the question of whether they would respect the rights of minorities, of “women and girls,” and human rights more generally.
There is layer upon layer of outrageous absurdity here. Let’s first remember who these sanctions are actually hurting: not Syria’s odious ruling class, but its millions of ordinary, innocent people.
Sanctioning Misery
Syria is one of the world’s most sanctioned countries, and this, on top of the various crises it has suffered over the past decade or so — including its brutal thirteen-year-long civil war and a horrific earthquake that still wasn’t enough for Washington to let up on pulverizing its economy — has made the country a living hell for its people. By 2022, before the earthquake did $5 billion worth of damage to the country, 90 percent of its twenty-four-million-person population lived in poverty. Over twelve million were food insecure, 14.6 million needed humanitarian aid, and basic living necessities like fuel, food, clean water, medicine, and medical supplies were in debilitatingly short supply.
Meanwhile, the loathsome Assad, the ostensible target of these sanctions, lived in an opulent mansion, buying high-end consumer brands and maintaining a luxury car collection. This underscores the absurdity of the situation — after all, it was his continuing rule over Syria that justified the sanctions.
As far back as 2006, a leaked diplomatic cable revealed Washington’s strategy to destabilize Assad by exploiting weaknesses in Syria’s “perpetually underperforming” economy, including discouraging foreign direct investment in Syria — which the sanctions have accomplished. Donald Trump called his Syria sanctions a way “to promote accountability for brutal acts against the Syrian people by the Assad regime.” Barack Obama similarly framed his earlier sanctions as a response to “the Assad government’s flagrant disrespect for the dignity of the Syrian people,” and an attempt at “pressuring President Assad to get out of the way of” a political transition in Syria.
Well, now Assad is gone and US officials have accomplished what they said they hoped to achieve. Yet it seems Washington is going to keep sanctioning Syria and immiserating its people anyway — first, for the crime of being ruled by a repressive dictator and now for being liberated from him by an al-Qaeda spin-off.
From Nusra to HTS
Of course, US officials argue that the rebels’ unsavory backgrounds make the sanctions necessary to keep them in line and prevent them from mistreating ordinary Syrians. Yet, aside from the fact that, again, these sanctions overwhelmingly harm the very Syrians they’re supposed to protect, this reasoning is particularly hypocritical. Washington has long been fully aware that the current state of affairs was a likely outcome of the regime change it hoped to support in the country.
As early as 2012, the Defense Intelligence Agency produced a memo arguing that al-Qaeda and other violent Islamist groups were “the major forces driving” the armed insurgency against Assad. The idea that there are “moderate rebels” for the United States to train in Syria has been literally laughable from the start of the US rebel-support program, with then vice president Joe Biden himself at one point admitting there was “no moderate middle” in the Syrian civil war. And according to the New York Times, Obama officials had feared from the start that the weapons and trained fighters they provided in the civil war would end up with the al-Qaeda-affiliated Al-Nusra Front, which is what ended up happening. Nusra later morphed into Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the rebels who just toppled Assad and took control of the country.
The US government, in other words, is punishing the Syrian people for a situation that it is not only partly complicit in, but that it was fully aware was a possibility if Assad fell — and for reasons entirely out of the hands of ordinary Syrians.
The claim that Syrians must continue to be starved and impoverished out of Western officials’ deep concern for human rights is particularly egregious. Besides the fact that US and European governments quite happily support brutal, discriminatory Middle Eastern autocracies — wave to the people, Egypt and Saudi Arabia — we are, as we speak, continuing to watch our governments unflinchingly facilitate one of the century’s most monstrous crimes: Israel’s systematic destruction of Palestinian life and society in Gaza.
Punishing the Innocent
According to the most recent United Nations report, the war in Gaza has left 50,000 pregnant women “without the essentials to survive” and 38,000 adolescent girls “facing famine-like conditions.” It makes Western invocations of concern for “women and girls” in Syria seem extremely disingenuous. It’s reminiscent of Afghanistan, where the United States also engineered an economic crisis supposedly to force the Taliban to meet basic standards of gender equality, but instead ended up plunging Afghan women into starvation and forced families to sell their daughters for food. That strategy didn’t end up turning the Taliban into champions of women’s rights — a grim omen for how successful it may turn out in Syria.
US policy in Syria doesn’t make any sense. For years, US and European officials wanted Assad’s ouster, accepting the risk of a power vacuum filled by extremist groups and the pauperization of innocent Syrians as the cost. Now that they got their wish, they’re going to keep economically punishing those Syrians anyway.
It’s a testament to the aimlessness of Western policy toward the country. But, after the past year’s chaos in the Middle East, it will no doubt also lead the region to seriously wonder if the United States and its partners have any coherent strategy for their part of the world other than simply sowing death and mayhem.