Syria is open for business, its people eager to invest, rebuild and consume. But the U.S. economic sanctions originally placed on the now-ousted Assad regime remain in place, preventing any significant postwar rebuilding from moving forward. Syria also continues to endure airstrikes by Israel, which have eviscerated the country’s defense infrastructure and continue to put people’s lives and livelihoods at risk.
Two U.S. lawmakers who visited Damascus unofficially in April have also concluded that the new Syria deserves a fresh start with the lifting of U.S. sanctions, and have since been lobbying the administration for conditional engagement with Damascus. During an interview with Al Sharq TV after his visit, Republican Rep. Marlin Stutzman of Florida said that Syria’s new government seemed committed to an open economy, open tourism and open journalism. “That’s not the sign of a dictatorial regime,” he said, adding: “I witnessed the fall of the Soviet Union, and saw how the Russian people were broken. But not Syrians. Everyone looked me in the eye. Kids played and smiled.” He added that based on his meetings with the new government, Syria “is not asking Washington for money or military aid,” only the lifting of sanctions, which is something he planned to relay to the White House. But so far there have been only timid steps from Washington toward engaging with Damascus, though the Trump administration has communicated a list of conditions it says must be met before it considers lifting the sanctions, with talks continuing. At the time of writing, whether any significant announcement will be made pertaining to Syria during Trump’s current visit to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates remained to be seen.
I spent the month of April in Damascus, my birthplace. It was my first time back since the fall of the regime. I had come and gone many times over the years, including during the war when I reported for Reuters and NPR from both regime- and rebel-controlled areas, without using my name for fear of reprisal. It was a dreadful time, when the people endured violence, disappearances, hunger and — even in the “safer places” under regime control — endless power cuts with bread and heating oil shortages that made life unlivable. People kept their thoughts to themselves and trusted no one, surviving against the odds in their day-to-day drudgery. So this time, I was especially attuned to what had changed. The war is over, destruction is ubiquitous and Syria’s economy is still strangulated. But for the first time in decades, and certainly in my lifetime, the Syrian people can finally talk openly with each other. They can even organize and congregate, acts unthinkable just six months ago. In April, I witnessed neighborhood committees openly debating how to improve the city, raising funds among themselves to pay for solar-powered street lights because the old lights had stopped working halfway through the war. They circulated petitions with demands from the new municipality to increase the number of sanitation workers, who had gone without pay for weeks since the new government took over because of a lack of solvency. (Under Assad, public sanitation workers were known to be government informants, which was how they supplemented their meager incomes.) I saw former government workers congregate in front of government buildings, peacefully demanding their jobs back, and I stumbled upon a diverse group of Damascenes protesting with signs and slogans against the euthanizing of stray dogs that have descended from the hilltops to parts of the city. Under Assad, no such public acts were possible unless organized by the state security apparatus and aimed to bolster its own agenda. Despite the difficult postwar conditions in the country, and the apprehension that people feel about their future under an untested government that has its roots in Islamism, everyone I met acknowledged that “now we can at least speak our minds freely.”
At Easter, I went to the Christian Quarter in the Old City, where I found things had also changed. The last sermon I had attended there was on Easter in 2014, when the patriarch delivered prayers for wartime Syria. Back then, when Assad was slaughtering his own people, he was also adamant in maintaining unwavering loyalty from all clergy, especially Christians, in line with his previous, West-facing image as the “protector of religious minorities.” I sat in the church pew and listened to the priests invoke the name of Assad each time they prayed to Jesus. It was not uncommon to hear them preach to their flock, “We thank Jesus … and our President Assad,” or “Jesus watches over us as does our President Assad.” Indeed, no member of the clergy, regardless of sect or religion, would have dared stray from demonstrating such fealty to Assad, which was also routinely expressed in mosques during Friday sermons.
Those days are over. In April, while walking through the Old City’s cobblestoned alleyways, I stumbled upon an event at the Syriac Orthodox Cathedral of St. George. A delegation from the new government was meeting with Patriarch Mor Ignatius Aphrem II of Antioch and All the East to wish his community a happy Easter, and to calm nerves after a coordinated attack on government security forces by former regime loyalists ignited a terrible spout of sectarian violence along the coast in early March, killing over 1,500 people, including many civilians.
“To be honest, the violence shook us, and we hope there will be transitional justice, not retributional justice,” the patriarch told the delegation. Since the new government came to power in December, Syrians from many sects have expressed similar worries about revenge violence and the forcing of extreme Islamist ideology on the people.
Thus far, Syria’s current transitional president, Ahmad al-Sharaa, who in his armed rebellion days was affiliated with al Qaeda, has continued to take steps to assuage such fears. In the early days of the new government, for example, when Damascenes complained that the newly arrived fighters proliferating in the city were masked, al-Sharaa ordered the masks removed. When some of them harassed establishments that served alcohol, al-Sharaa disciplined the perpetrators. And yes, you can still legally drink alcohol in Syria, even in some conservative Muslim neighborhoods where patrons might ask to be served beer surreptitiously in a teacup rather than in a conspicuous glass.
But there are still extremist armed groups that fought alongside al-Sharaa in the months and years that led up to Dec. 8, when Assad fled Damascus to Russia, ending the Assads’ 55-year rule. Not all of these armed jihadists have agreed to be folded into the discipline of the country’s new Defense Ministry, which makes them a threat to civilians and to the new government’s efforts to stabilize the country. They, along with former regime loyalists (who have lost access to the illicit and lucrative Captagon drug trade) and many other Syrians who have armed themselves since the war started in 2011, remain a wild card that can increase sectarian tensions and spark violence.
This scenario played out in April, when armed factions targeted members of the Druze community in Jaramana, an area outside of Damascus, after an incendiary recording of a man insulting the Prophet Muhammad went viral. The recording was falsely attributed to a Druze leader. At least 30 people were killed in the violence before the authorities regained control and local Druze elders moved to calm passions.
One of the immediate problems facing the new government is insolvency or, as locals like to point out, “starting from below zero.” The country is broke, though many international actors are ready to throw it a lifeline, if only to give the new government a chance to prove itself.
Last week the U.S. Treasury, which under the current U.S. sanctions would punish any country or entity that paid money directly into Syria’s Central bank, approved a temporary waiver to allow Qatar to inject $29 million per month into Syria, subject to renewal after three months, to help the new government pay the salaries of civil servants across government, except in the defense and interior ministries.
The move has been lauded in Syria, where most civil servants have been unpaid for months. But it’s only a baby step toward real improvements.
“The sanctions are affecting us all — all of the Syrian people,” the patriarch, who is Syrian-American, told the government delegation. He added that he had been lobbying his contacts in the U.S., where he spent a decade before returning to Syria, to lift the sanctions. “Let’s speak frankly about the sanctions,” he said. “They affect only ordinary people. I, for example, can manage to personally procure anything I need from abroad, and so can any government official. But it’s ordinary people who suffer from the sanctions.”
U.S. sanctions, originally introduced against the now-ousted Assad regime, have become unjustly cumbersome for postwar Syria. They affect every sector and aspect of human life, from medicine to telecoms and retail, from transportation to finance and construction.
“There are sanctions on the media sector,” one government official told New Lines on condition of anonymity. “We can’t subscribe to the wire services, like the AP and Reuters! We can’t broadcast. We can’t use satellites or launch our own for our TV station. We can’t use AI for fact-checking or tracking news. We can’t engage with the international community or Syrians living abroad through broadcasting via satellite. These are basic services that we can’t access due to sanctions,” the official added.
All infrastructure in Syria, a former Soviet ally, is outdated, and much of it has been destroyed in the war. As the country aims to rejoin the global community, it must contend with the technological leaps that it has missed, like fiber optics, digital computing and AI — especially since it is already opening up to the world and faces sophisticated, state-sponsored disinformation campaigns.
“It’s essential for us to launch a robust media culture to combat campaigns of misinformation and disinformation that target our population, which will be a continuous threat,” the official added.
Sanctions also mean that while in Syria, you can’t use many of the apps or access websites that people elsewhere in the world have come to rely on, the tools that lubricate an economy and connect it with the international markets. These include basic workspace services like Google Docs, iCalender or Zoom. You can’t even download a weather app or read a news article on CNN’s website. Indeed, U.S. sanctions have become so ridiculous that on a recent trip, when I stopped at the Apple Store in London to purchase an iPhone as a gift for a loved one in Syria, and I inquired about how the apparatus might be activated from there, I was informed by the store manager that Apple “could not sell” me the device if I was planning on taking it to Syria “due to sanctions.”
I later relayed this message to my loved one in Damascus, who was struck by its irony. “We thought the sanctions were against the Assad regime. But now Assad is gone and the sanctions remain. So the sanctions were always against us, the people?”
Smart phones are ubiquitous in Syria, now as they were under Assad, who turned a blind eye to smugglers who brought them from Lebanon, then levied high import tariffs on their activation as a way to raise money. Most Syrians know how to use a virtual private network (VPN) to access what the rest of the world already has at its fingertips. But these remedies are not a panacea for the official government channels that are trying to jump-start the country.
Later, I privately asked the patriarch if he believed the current Syrian government was sincere in its efforts to create a pluralistic environment conducive to his community’s well-being and to combating sectarianism and extremism, as the government delegation articulated repeatedly.
“I have no reason to doubt their good intentions. They want to serve Syria, and it’s in their best interest and in ours to have stability and prosperity, and I have the sense that they’re working toward that, but they need help, from us and from outside as well,” the patriarch told me. The new government “came but they don’t yet have the capabilities, they don’t have the numbers and so on, so until they build themselves and have full control of the country, they need time,” he said.
Since the war started in 2011, Syria’s Christians have seen their numbers dwindle by two-thirds due to migration.
“But we insist on remaining here and living here, and there’s a duty of the new government to facilitate and help us to stay. Most important is to have laws that protect everyone, and equality so we don’t feel ourselves, God forbid, as second-class citizens,” he added.
Syria’s interim constitution offers protection for all Syrians, equal before the law regardless of sex, creed or religion. It is based on the country’s constitution from 1950, when Syria, recently independent from the French Mandate, was experiencing a flurry of democratic ideas, openness and free expression. Though the current constitution is not perfect, “it’s definitely a step in the right direction,” said Anwar al Bunni, a Syrian rights lawyer and former political prisoner now residing in Germany. “Sure, the priorities now are the economy and security, which can be achieved only with the lifting of U.S. sanctions. But that doesn’t stop us from continuing our work. I am very optimistic.”
And although it could stand to have more diversity, the new Syrian government body does include appointees from various sects as well as women — though not yet nearly enough.
As Syria struggles to rebuild under these conditions, it is also enduring a relentless military campaign from Israel, which has been lobbying the Trump administration to “keep Syria weak.”
During the final years of Assad’s regime, when he and Russia were bombing Syrians who lived in rebel-held areas across the country, Israel was carrying out regular airstrikes against Hezbollah and Iranian Islamic Republic Guard Corps positions throughout Syria. These increased in frequency in the months that led up to Israel’s September pager attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon and the airstrike 10 days later that killed the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, which handicapped the organization. Since then, Israel has continued to intensify its strikes against military infrastructure inside Syria, in effect eviscerating the country’s already dilapidated (Russian-grade) defenses, which included chemical weapons depots that Assad used against his own people. When Assad fled Damascus on Dec. 8, Israel immediately violated the 1974 Disengagement Agreement with Syria and seized control of more territory in the Golan Heights, an area essential to the water supply that Damascus and other Syrian provinces rely on. The incursion into Syrian territory, which Israel has signaled it wants to occupy permanently, has already caused the death of civilians, and there are ongoing reports of Israeli soldiers in Syria routinely killing the livestock of shepherds and carrying out intimidation campaigns to deter locals from speaking with international media.
One irony of the Syria policy pursued by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right government coalition is that not since the Islamic Revolution in 1979 have the authorities in Syria been so vehemently committed to keeping out Iranian influence, which has been the bane of Israel’s security concerns along its northern borders. Most Syrians are even thankful for Israel’s debilitating attack on Hezbollah, which has the blood of tens of thousands of innocent Syrians on its hands after years of fighting alongside Assad. The idea of normalizing diplomatic relations with Israel is not off the table, neither for the Syrian government nor for the Syrian people, who seem to believe that it is inevitable and essential for the region to prosper. And yet, instead of seizing on this historic opportunity to permanently cut off Iran’s tentacles, the Netanyahu government instead seems committed to meddling in Syria’s internal affairs with the aim of gaining more land, dangerously inflaming sectarian tensions during this precarious period of Syria’s postwar transition.
Perhaps one example illustrates the extent to which an already traumatized Syrian population continues to suffer in silence, unable to call the world’s attention to its plight. Often, when Israel bombs Assad’s decommissioned chemical weapons depots, as it did (for the umpteenth time) during my visit, residents in the vicinity of the attack become ill with flu-like symptoms. Environmental contamination from Israel’s bombardment is an established fact, according to the Chemical Violations Documentation Center of Syria, a Brussels-based nonprofit that has been documenting the use of chemical weapons in Syria under Assad. But the residents who suffer from this contamination directly and frequently can not even dial 999, the emergency responder number, because Syria’s emergency system has long been destroyed as a result of the civil war and, so far, any equipment or foreign investment required to rebuild it remains at least partially subject to U.S. sanctions.
And yet, Syrians persevere. They survived decades of brutal dictatorship, 15 years of civil war fueled by regional actors and, when the Assad regime finally fell, learned the extent of the systematic disappearances and mass executions that had claimed the lives of their loved ones on an industrial scale.
On April 30, the day that Israel struck three times near Damascus, in Sahnaya — strikes I heard while seated in my living room drafting notes for this essay — the new Syrian government reinstated routine civil services, which had come to a halt since the fall of Assad in December, in the province of Damascus. The people of Damascus can now issue death certificates for loved ones and register their marriages, divorces and new births. Ordinary life must carry on, even as postwar Syria remains in dire need of reconstruction efforts on the scale of a Marshall Plan. And while the U.S. and regional players play Machiavellian political games, one middle-aged Damascene married to a merchant captured the country’s sentiment when she asked me, wide-eyed: “When the sanctions are rolled back, do you think we’ll finally be able to order things from Amazon?”
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