Syria Today | US renews sanctions against Syria

US renews sanctions against Syria

US President Barack Obama renewed sanctions against Syria on May 8 despite a recent period of political dialogue between the two countries since he took office.

In a letter to Congress, Obama stated that the sanctions had been renewed because Syria “still posed a threat to US interests”. He also repeated former US President George Bush’s allegations that Damascus is “supporting terrorism, pursuing weapons of mass destruction and missile programmes, and undermining US and international efforts with respect to the stabilisation and reconstruction of Iraq”, according to the Reuters news agency.

“The president felt it was necessary to take these measures,” State Department Spokesman Robert Wood told reporters in Washington. “These are not new sanctions. We have some very serious problems with the government of Syria and we hope to be able to work out those differences, but a lot of it is going to be up to Syria.”

The sanctions, which were introduced by the Bush administration in 2004, will remain in place for another year before coming up for review again. The sanctions prohibit arms exports to Syria, block the state-run Syrian Airlines from operating in the US and allow for the freezing of assets of Syrians suspected of having links to groups the US labels as “terrorist organisations” such as the Palestinian faction Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

Renewal of the sanctions came one day after senior US envoys Jeffrey Feltman and Daniel Shapiro met with Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Mu’allem in Damascus on May 7. Feltman described the meeting as “constructive”, stating that the visit was a continuation of the Obama administration’s efforts to engage with Syria.

Syrian officials played down the renewal to local media, describing the move as a “routine measure” that will not affect its talks with Washington.

“For Obama to give up the sanctions would have been a bold gesture and it could have moved Syrian-American relations to a new level,” Hamidi Abdullah, director of the Arab Information Center, a Damascus-based think tank, told Syria Today. “But we are not expecting such a radical shift from the policies of the previous administration. There are people, like Feltman, who are from the Bush days and their anti-Syrian mindset has not changed.”

The volume of trade between Syria and the US totalled SYP 36.1bn (USD 760.9m) in 2008 and amounted to SYP 185.2bn (USD 3.9bn) during Bush’s eight years in office, according to statistics from the US Census Bureau. The volume of trade by the end of Obama’s first three months in office was SYP 6.3bn (USD 132m), compared with SYP 11bn (USD 233m) over the same period last year under Bush.