US Should Be Cautious on Syria Sanctions Relief, Lawmakers Hear

Syria's new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, and his country "deserve a chance, but the new Syria -- like the former Syria -- should be held accountable for its actions,” said David Schenker, Taube senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Should al-Sharaa persist in staffing its government and military with terrorists, for example, the administration should be prepared to re-implement sanctions.”

Schenker said the State Department gave the Syrian government a list of eight demands in March and later pared it to five: join the Abraham Accords with Israel, expel all foreign terrorists, deport Palestinian terrorist groups, help the U.S. prevent the resurgence of the Islamic State, and manage Islamic State detention centers. “Progress on performance vis-a-vis the administration’s requests should be benchmarked and notional timelines set,” he testified before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa.

Schenker said Syria is meeting some of the expectations, such as by cooperating with the U.S. on counterterrorism. But he believes the integration of foreign fighters into Syria’s military, which the Trump administration reportedly consented to, could become problematic.

"Time will tell whether suspending the sanctions was the right decision," he said. "A gradual process may have had more success at shaping the new government over time. Or perhaps economic pressures would have scuttled al-Sharaa’s already improbable attempt to stabilize a fractious and scarred Syria."

While several subcommittee members welcomed the Trump administration’s decision last month to lift sanctions on Syria (see 2505130061), saying it will give the war-torn country a chance to rebuild, Rep. Kweisi Mfume, D-Md., said he’s not convinced the new government will be any better than the Bashar al-Assad regime that was deposed in December. Mfume would prefer to “proceed not with giant steps but little bitty steps that we measure daily, weekly and monthly in this process.”

Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, D-Fla., the subcommittee’s ranking member, said the administration hasn’t given Congress enough information about how it plans to remove sanctions. She favors “conditions-based sanction relief policies” and believes Congress may need to establish those in legislation.

Jon Alterman, Zbigniew Brzezinski chair in global security and geostrategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the U.S. should support al-Sharaa "modestly," test him "continuously" and "ensure that our allies and partners in the region remain closely tied to our policy. While that's not a completely satisfactory path, it's better than alternatives where we contribute to Syria’s ultimate failure, or where our allies and partners end up on a very different page than us, or with each other," Alterman testified.

Anna Borshchevskaya, Harold Grinspoon senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the U.S. should impose additional sanctions on Russia and crack down on its “ghost fleet” of illicit oil tankers to deprive it of revenue and make it harder for Moscow to re-establish control in Syria.

“Russia cannot be part of a solution, especially not after helping Assad destroy this country,” she testified. “Our credibility is on the line at this point.”

Borshchevskaya said the U.S. could help Syria and Ukraine at the same time by facilitating trade between the two countries, such as deliveries of Ukrainian wheat to Syria and the rest of the region.