President Donald Trump said he was ordering the lifting of U.S. sanctions on Syria to start the process of normalizing relations between Washington and Damascus in hopes of bolstering the war-torn country’s new government, more than a decade after the Obama administration severed diplomatic ties at the outset of the civil war which ended with the ousting of dictator Bashar al-Assad last year.
Speaking in Riyadh, where he addressed a Saudi-American investment forum on the first day of his four-day, three country swing through the Middle East, Trump said the new Syrian government “will hopefully succeed in stabilizing the country and keeping peace” after the country saw “their share of travesty and war” over “many years.”
He told the audience of Saudi and American dignitaries that Secretary of State Marco Rubio will meet with the new Syrian foreign minister in Turkey later in the week, and citing discussions with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Trump also revealed that he is ordering “the cessation of sanctions against Syria” to give the new government “a chance at greatness.”
“The sanctions were brutal and crippling and served as an important, really an important function, nevertheless, at the time, but now it’s their time to shine. It’s their time to shine. We’re taking them all off,” he said. “So I say, Good luck Syria. Show us something very special, like they’ve done, frankly, in Saudi Arabia.”
Ahead of the president’s speech, a White House official also said Trump had “agreed to say hello” to Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa — the former Islamic militant leader who has served as Syria’s de facto president since al-Assad fled the country and took up an offer of asylum in Russia last December — even though Sharaa remains on a list of terrorists maintained by the American government.
Sharaa once fought with Al Qaeda in Iraq after the U.S-led invasion in 2003. He later led the Syrian branch of the terror organization that carried out the 9/11 attacks, before breaking away in 2016 to form what became Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the group that ousted Assad.
Since coming to power in a blistering offensive last year that swept away the Assad dynasty after more than five decades in power, Sharaa has promised to deliver an inclusive government until free and fair elections can be held.
Trump’s announcement of an end to more than a decade of harsh economic penalties that had been levied against the former Assad regime as a result of the deposed dictator’s use of chemical weapons against the Syrian people and other atrocities came moments after he restated his openness to a relaxing of tensions with the Iranian government.
In his remarks, he offered a rhetorical olive branch to Iran and said the United States wants it to be “a wonderful, safe, great country” if its leaders choose to forswear their longtime pursuit of nuclear weapons, the latest in a series of signals meant to deescalate decades of tensions between Washington and Tehran by reaching a new nuclear nonproliferation agreement eight years after he threw out one reached during the Obama administration.
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