UN Not Ready to Ease Syria Sanctions, US Official Says
The U.N. Security Council isn’t yet ready to follow the U.S. in removing a broad range of sanctions against Syria, said Thomas Barrack, the Trump administration’s special envoy to Syria and ambassador to Turkey.
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Barrack, speaking to reporters last week, said some members of the council “want to see more progress" on several issues, including how the new Syrian regime treats minorities and how it forms its new constitution. He stressed that the U.S. isn’t pressuring the U.N. to lift sanctions even though Trump in June signed an executive order to remove certain financial sanctions and export controls against Syria (see 2506300055).
Some Security Council members believe removing sanctions in their “entirety is a mistake," Barrack said, but the U.S. disagrees. The Trump administration believes it needs “leverage to encourage the new government to do the right things in the right steps,” he said. “My humble personal opinion is they are. They're trying, but they're resource-constrained.”
He specifically mentioned the possibility of the U.N. removing sanctions against Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, which has been designated for years for being an al-Qaida affiliate in Syria. The State Department revoked the foreign terrorist organization esignation of the group earlier this month following the announced dissolution of the organization and the Syrian government’s commitment to combat terrorism (see 2507070002).
The U.S. is hoping to give the U.N. the "resources to be able to look at it, analyze it, without dictating to them exactly what to do,” Barrack said. "There's no adversarial [part] of this -- we're all trying to figure it out."
He added that Trump’s decision to immediately remove the sanctions is an “experiment,” and it could serve as a template for how the U.S. encourages positive regime changes in other sanctioned nations.
“What the president did is say: ‘I'm going to take the sanctions off. I'm not going to unwrap them like an onion,’” Barrack said. “It's an experiment, and we're at the very beginning.”