United States President Donald Trump signed an executive order to eliminate sanctions imposed on Syria, a measure he had announced in May after talking to the new Damascus government.
The measure, effective starting on Tuesday (1st), maintains sanctions against the deposed dictator, Bashar al-Assad, as well as “his associates, human rights violators, drug traffickers, people linked to activities with chemical weapons, Islamic state or their Iranian affiliates and representatives,” the US government said in a statement.
This order “allows the relaxation of export controls on certain goods and eliminates restrictions on some foreign assistance to Syria”, and provides support for Damascus’s efforts to rebuild and combat terrorism without empowering harmful actors, adds the note.
The signing of the Order is a unique opportunity to redesign relations with Damascus and in the region, as the US ambassador in Türkiye said, Thomas Barck, in an interview by teleconference.
The ambassador insisted that the US President considers that Syria “deserves an opportunity” and that with this decision he wants to “reintegrate into society those who helped fight the Islamic State and other groups, and this also includes the Kurds in the equation.”
“We created a window (diplomatic opportunity), which in Iran never existed,” said Barck.
Trump announced on May 13 the revocation of sanctions against Syria in his speech in an investment forum in Saudi Arabia, after admitting that they had been “devastating”, although with “an important function.”
One day later, the US President met with Syria’s interim president Ahmed Al Sharaa, in what was the first meeting of two nations leaders in 25 years.
The new Syrian President was the founder of what was the Syrian branch of the al Qaeda terrorist network, known as the Al Nusra Front, and was detained for almost five years by US troops in Iraq, where he fought them after the American invasion in 2003.
