How U.S. Sanctions Can Crack the Syrian Regime – By Adham Sahloul, Sana Sekkarie, and Sandy Alkoutami; Joshua Landis and Steven Simon (Foreign Affairs) / Sept 4 2020
Assad’s War Crimes Demand Accountability
In “The Pointless Cruelty of Trump’s New Syria Sanctions” (August 17, 2020), Joshua Landis and Steven Simon argue that the new American sanctions imposed against backers of the Syrian regime harm ordinary Syrians and fail to advance core American interests. The authors ignore the fact, however, that the main source of Syria’s suffering is the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, whose atrocities have gone unchecked for almost a decade. The new U.S. sanctions help limit the Assad regime’s ability to harm its people, which is good for both Syria and the United States.
The authors imply that the new sanctions, which are part of the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act (2019), are an initiative of the Trump administration. Yet the Caesar sanctions are the product of congressional legislation passed with wide bipartisan support and engagement from Syrian civil society groups. Framing the sanctions as a policy of President Donald Trump’s administration overlooks the concerted efforts of diverse advocates and obscures the fact that the sanctions survived bipartisan scrutiny for years before being added to the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act.
WAR CRIMES
The Caesar Act takes its name from the code-named military defector who leaked more than 50,000 photos of prisoners being systematically tortured and killed by the Syrian government. Tens of thousands of people have been arrested and tortured in the regime’s prisons since 2011, and arbitrary arrests in territory retaken by the government continue to this day. The Assad regime has never granted the Red Cross access to detainees, and to make room for new prisoners, the government conducts mass executions: war crimes investigators with the nonprofit Commission for International Justice and Accountability have found government memos detailing deaths in detention, and The New York Times and others have reported the discovery of mass graves where political prisoners are buried.
By imposing sanctions on Syria, the United States denies war criminals access to cash and furthers American interests, stopping the outflow of refugees, for example, and preventing the next Islamic State (also known as ISIS) from emerging. Caesar sanctions signal to Assad and other autocrats that scorched-earth tactics—such as targeting hospitals and systematically disappearing, torturing, and cremating the bodies of political prisoners—will not be dismissed as something normal. The European Union, too, recognizes that war crimes must not be rewarded, and it has joined the United States in enforcing the new sanctions against the Assad regime.
Continue to article: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/middle-east/2020-09-04/how-us-sanctions-can-crack-syrian-regime
