Following the devastating series of earthquakes that struck southern Turkey and northwest Syria on Monday, the Syrian regime has re-energized its calls for lifting sanctions leveled against it. Syrian government spokeswoman Bouthaina Shaaban told Sky News that if the United States and the European Union lift sanctions, then “the Syrian people will be able to take care of their country”. A number of well-meaning civil society and religious groups have also made similar pleas.
The U.S. State Department has thus far rightly dismissed such calls. But as the full scope of the destruction and human suffering comes into focus, expect these calls to intensify. Here’s why the United States should hold its ground.
The U.S. government has imposed a number of sanctions against the Syrian regime going back to 1979 because of its designation as a state sponsor of terrorism and its occupation of Lebanon. Following President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal crackdown on protesters demanding change in 2011, the U.S. government imposed additional targeted sanctions to deprive the regime of the resources it needs to continue its violence against civilians. This included blocking property of regime officials and prohibiting the importation by the United States of Syrian oil.
In 2019, Congress passed the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, named after a Syrian military defector who exposed widespread abuse and killings in Assad’s jails. The act placed further sanctions on Syrian government industries and foreign entities that provided financial or material support to the regime.
The motivation behind these sanctions, especially those post-2011, is straightforward: to limit Assad’s ability to finance his military and militias who have been implicated in some of the worst atrocities of this century. As his main international backers, the governments of Iran and Russia have tried hard to shift the blame for Syria’s economic woes from Assad’s role in destroying the country to the sanctions. While sanctions have certainly contributed to stunting government expenditures and the Syrian lira’s depreciation, they have had no significant bearing on the delivery of humanitarian assistance.
In fact, since the start of the conflict, the main conduit for humanitarian assistance into Syria, the United Nations, has primarily worked in regime-held areas. Despite documented corruption within the U.N. procurement process and Syrian regime influence over where aid is delivered in Syria, the United States remains the leading donor, providing nearly $16 billion throughout Syria and the region. Most of this assistance is actually spent in regime-controlled areas, because the regime prohibits most of this aid from ever reaching opposition-held communities.
During my time at the State Department, the regime was besieging up to 18 opposition-held towns, where it denied them access to food or medicine. U.N. and Red Cross convoys were regularly turned back, and those that were allowed to pass through were stripped of medical and other lifesaving content. Over the course of the conflict, Russia has managed to hold the Security Council hostage by forcing it to agree to a single border crossing from Turkey into northern Syria to deliver humanitarian aid into opposition-held communities. It is these same communities that now lie under rubble and desperately need international assistance.
According to Syrian rescue organization the White Helmets, there has been no communication from the United Nations, and only one U.N. aid convoy has been sent to the affected areas since the earthquakes struck. They report that hundreds of families are still trapped under collapsed buildings with cold temperatures closing the window for survival.
Rather than misplaced calls to lift sanctions on a regime that displaced millions of people now affected by the earthquake, what is needed is immediate and direct outreach and assistance to Syrians in the northwestern corner of the country, as well as a surge of specialized teams and lifesaving aid across all available border crossings from Turkey.
A list of organizations providing support in northwest Syria is here. Those wanting to help the people of Syria should work through them. Assad and his regime cannot possibly be relied upon to help the very people they have been trying to exterminate for more than a decade. Only the good people of the world can.
Wa’el Alzayat is the chief executive of Emgage, a national Muslim voter mobilization and advocacy organization. He formerly served at the U.S. State Department for a decade as a Middle East policy expert.