“the U.S. Department of the Treasury issued a three-page waiver lifting almost all economic sanctions on Syria unconditionally.”
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“the Syrian government handed back the old U.S. ambassador’s residence to Thomas Barrack, who serves as both U.S. ambassador to Turkey and special envoy to Syria.”
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“a waiver isn’t a permanent end to sanctions. The sanctions imposed by Congress have to be lifted by Congress…Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that it should do exactly that.”
“Sanctions are a complicated bureaucratic knot to untangle. Aaron Zelin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, warned on X that “people in [Trump’s] own administration are trying to stop it or slow it down severely.” And a Syrian government minister tells Reason that a U.S. delegation has come with a set of “requests” for Syria to fulfill.
The Caesar Civilian Protection Act, passed after Assad had fought a civil war against rebels to a standstill, punishes foreign investment in reconstructing areas under the Syrian government’s control. There is also a general U.S. trade embargo on Syria passed by executive order. And Sharaa himself is a designated terrorist because of his past fighting for Al Qaeda, which he later violently turned against.”
“Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa and Gen. Mazloum Abdi make an odd couple. Abdi is a Kurdish rebel leader whose secular army boasts all-women units and fights alongside the U.S. military. Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammad al-Golani, is a former franchisee of Al Qaeda who runs the new Islamist government in Damascus.
Yet the two men, both of whom traded in their military fatigues for ill-fitting suits, were shaking hands and grinning for the camera on Monday. They had an agreement—at least in principle—for Abdi’s Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to merge into the government in exchange for Sharaa recognizing Kurds’ hard-won rights. The exact details would be hammered out by the end of 2025 by a newly formed committee.”
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“President Donald Trump has long wanted to pull U.S. troops out of Syria. But his previous attempt to do so, in October 2019, was a violent catastrophe. Turkey took Trump’s withdrawal announcement as a green light to attack the SDF, and hawks in the administration played what they openly called “shell games” to keep U.S. forces in the country anyway.
A deal between the SDF and the central government might be the best opportunity for a graceful U.S. exit. In fact, Syria TV claims that the deal between Abdi and Sharaa was inked as a direct response to Trump telling his generals to pull U.S. troops out of Syria.”
“Monitoring groups including Syria Network for Human Rights (SNHR) – an independent UK-based group – said over 1,000 people died in the violence, more than half killed by forces aligned with the new authorities and others by Assad loyalists. SNHR said the dead included 595 civilians and unarmed fighters, the vast majority Alawite.”
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“The mass killings were mostly carried out by gunmen from various factions aligned with the new government, including GSS, according to several of the witnesses.”
“Kobane, Syria, was home to one of the most famous military turning points in history. A small force of Kurdish guerrillas, pressed between the advancing Islamic State group and the Turkish border, was supposed to have fallen quickly in a tragic last stand. Obama administration officials said as much. Instead, the Kurds of Kobane successfully held out for six months, enough time for the cavalry—the U.S. Air Force and rebels from elsewhere in Syria—to arrive.”
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“Kobane came under attack again. With the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Damascus and the uncertainty over what comes next, Turkey has been seeking an opportunity to wipe out its Kurdish opponents and carve out a puppet state in Syria’s north. With air cover from the Turkish Air Force, militias known as the Syrian National Army (SNA) overran the nearby city of Manbij and marched toward Kobane.
“In the last war, the people fled to Turkey. This time, it will be a genocide,” Berivan Hesen, a member of Kobane’s local government who lived through the Islamic State group’s siege, said via text message on Tuesday. “They are all ISIS by a different name.” Hesen notes that many of the people living in Kobane now had fled from other parts of Syria under Turkish and SNA control, such as Afrin, where the same forces have committed looting, rape, and torture since occupying it in 2018.
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) agreed to “American mediation” with Turkey, the SDF’s Gen. Mazloum Abdi announced on Tuesday night, withdrawing forces from Manbij in hopes that Kobane would be spared. (The next day, Turkey launched drone strikes across North and East Syria.)”