Kevork Almassian, Substack, May 14, 2025

Will the sanctions really be lifted?  [jb]

For over a decade, the Syrian people have endured one of the most punishing economic sieges of modern history. Western governments, with full-throated support from exile activists and lobbyists posing as “human rights defenders,” weaponized sanctions against Syria — not to target military installations or government elites, but to demoralize, starve, and break the will of the population.

Now, in a bitter twist of irony, those same actors are suddenly calling for the lifting of sanctions. Why? Because they are trying to clear the path for the rehabilitation of none other than Abu Mohammad al-Julani — the former Al-Qaeda warlord currently dressed up for polite Western company.

Let’s be clear: the sanctions were never about human rights. If they were, we wouldn’t be seeing them systematically destroy Syria’s healthcare system, paralyze its education sector, and make basic infrastructure repair — like rebuilding water dams and hospitals — virtually impossible.

These weren’t incidental byproducts. These were the intended effects.

The goal was to break Syria from the inside, to push its people below the poverty line until they gave up resisting regime change.

Those who cheered the sanctions back then — the think tanks, the NGOs, the foreign policy influencers — are now trying to rewrite history. Today, they solemnly admit that sanctions “hurt the Syrian people.” But if these same sanctions were so benign as they once claimed, why are they racing to lift them now, as part of negotiations involving Julani and his Western backers?

Because everyone always knew the truth. The sanctions did hurt the Syrian people. That was the point.

And now, after unleashing this economic warfare, the plan is to replace what remains of the Syrian state with a warlord-led pseudo-government propped up by the same foreign powers that orchestrated the conflict.

The poster child of this grotesque makeover is Julani — a man who says he won’t stop in Damascus but will go all the way to Jerusalem. But don’t be fooled by the implied defiance; he doesn’t mean it as a liberator. He means it as a partner in normalization with Israel.

So, we’ve come full circle: The West, along with key regional actors, are lifting sanctions not to heal Syria, but to hand it over to a militant with a record of pogroms, torture, and medieval-style governance.

This isn’t the end of war. It’s the culmination of regime change by other means.

The Syrian people are now being told to accept this outcome — after being bombed, sanctioned, and starved — as their reward for surviving. To accept Julani’s normalization with Israel. To accept that their sovereignty must be sold off so Washington, Paris, and Doha can save face.

No one voted for Julani. No Syrian consented to foreign sanctions that collapsed their currency and stole their future. And yet, this is now presented as the only viable path forward, as though there were no other alternative. But Syrians remember the alternative — they lived it. And millions of them stood with the Syrian Army not out of love for Assad, but to avoid exactly what is now unfolding: a fragmented state run by foreign-backed extremists masquerading as reformers.

If the West truly cares about Syria’s future, lifting sanctions must not be conditioned on accepting war criminals in suits. It must not be used as leverage to reward terrorism with statehood. And it certainly must not come with a normalization package that includes turning Damascus into a corridor for Tel Aviv.

The West cannot reverse the chaos it unleashed in Syria, but it can stop compounding it. Sanctions should have never been imposed, and lifting them should be a moral imperative — not a tool for strategic extortion in favor of a militant who once pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda.

One last word: I have worked consistently in the past decade to raise awareness about the dreadful impacts of these illegal sanctions against the Syrian people.

Today, my position is the same: I’ll not be a hypocrite and support them now to score points against the Julani regime.

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