Middle East Politics
- Thread starter Raoul
- Start date
"Please stop being so Islamic and we will lift sanctions".
These people are a joke. It will only push Syria closer to Turkey and the Gulf states, and potentially reinvigorate relations with Putin's Russia.
These people are a joke. It will only push Syria closer to Turkey and the Gulf states, and potentially reinvigorate relations with Putin's Russia.
It is quite short sighted isn't it. Keeping the sanctions will only increase the chance of reverting to the same situation as they were in. And at the same time Germany and other EU countries want refugees return to Syria. This isn't really the way to encourage that. This does feel like a message to a domestic audience that they are taking Islamic terror threats seriously, so I think the resistance to lift sanctions isn't going to last long, its just a bit of posturing. Al-Sharaa/Jolani also seems to understand that his former ties to al-Qaeda are a reason to give people caution, so he will be patient here I think.
And although they have mostly been reasonable in their statements, it is true that there are signs that the interim government wants to enact a more fundamental Islamic approach to governance, like this for example:
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/02/...syrias-school-curriculum-spark-online-outrage
Where they wanted to remove teachings of evolution, big bang theory, removal of references to historical events, etc And involve a more Islamic view on certain things. They backed out of it after backlash from the public but could be a sign of things to come once they've achieved international normalization.
Indeed. At best, I see this as European leaders not wanting to look like naive politicians, who if things happen to go wrong, look like they gullibly capitulated to Sharaa's transition from militant to statesman. Suspect they will change their minds once they receive sufficient pushback in the media.
This seems quite prematurely self congratulatory.
I’m as happy as any non Syrian that Assad is gone but there are so many unknowns still. We don’t know if what will come will be better. We don’t know if the country is going to slip into civil war again.
More importantly, Assad’s forces were clearly unable/ unwilling to fight back in the same way as they did before, without the support of its allies who previously saved them, who are currently preoccupied with a brutal war on their doorstep, likely preparing for Israeli/ American strikes or had their entire leadership decapitated very recently.
Without the Ukraine war/ October 7th, those same groups likely come back in and prop Assad up as they did before.
There’s videos going around allegedly of new Minister for Justice Shadi al-Waisi overseeing public executions of women accused of adultery in Idlib during the Jabhat al-Nusra days back in 2015 (e.g. see here, warning - it shows a woman being shot).
It is still early days in Syria, but the point he’s making is that some of these conflicts don’t end in negotiated settlement; rather they end in one side defeating the other in battle, which is why the likes of Ukraine v Russia is likely to grind on until someone wins militarily. I believe this journo is a correspondent for Ukraine, which is why he’s making this point.
Exactly the sort of thing I was worried about when this new madness took over. The old madness was madness and brutal, but what is it being exchanged for?
I appreciate his point. My point is that what allowed the military victory owed as much, if not more, to external factors , than it did internal.
I’m not sure this was a smart move to hold out for geopolitical events by the Syrian rebels and more taking advantage of a situation very few saw coming.
I believe the Russians continued fighting the rebels on Assad's behalf throughout the Russia/Ukraine war, and in fact also continued bombing HTS positions after they launched their latest offensives in Aleppo and beyond. What the events of the past 6 weeks show is that Putin has been propping up Assad since October of 2015, and if not for Russian troops intervening, Assad would've likely been gone a decade ago. But even with continued Russian support, Assad was always going to fall because he lacked sufficient domestic support to repel the rebels once Russian support thinned.
tl;dr : A perfect storm of converging events led to Assad’s fall.
- Assad’s own petulance of not wanting negotiate with Erdogan because he didn’t believe he needed to make concessions.
- The Israeli campaign in Lebanon weakened Hezbollah’s ability to support Assad.
- The Iranian air bridge across Iraq to provide logistical and military support to Assad was unstable.
- Putin was distracted in Ukraine and was making himself less available to Assad.
- Assad’s own petulance of not wanting negotiate with Erdogan because he didn’t believe he needed to make concessions.
- The Israeli campaign in Lebanon weakened Hezbollah’s ability to support Assad.
- The Iranian air bridge across Iraq to provide logistical and military support to Assad was unstable.
- Putin was distracted in Ukraine and was making himself less available to Assad.
Report: Israel mulling international summit that would divide Syria into cantons
Israeli government and security officials have reportedly been holding covert talks about the future of Syria, including an initiative for an international summit that would discuss a proposal to split Syria into different administrative divisions (cantons) in order to guarantee the safety and rights of all Syrian ethnic groups.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveb...-summit-that-would-divide-syria-into-cantons/
There's a US state in there somewhere.
I'm sure the Israelis are sincere with their concerns about the safety and rights of neighbouring Arabs.
And Kurds don’t forget!
I haven't forgotten us. Unfortunately some Kurds are naive enough to see Israelis as benevolent bedfellows in the region.
Pro-peace leftist Iranian academic
Did no one tell Germany's foreign office that the Assad regime is no more?
There's some sanctions on individuals from the Assad regime which should be held up, sure, but there is zero logic in talking about maintaining sanctions on Assads regime. So surely just some goof by whoever is writing these tweets, but doesn't exactly give an impression of confidence in these institutions.
According to Charles Lister though, Germany and Italy in particular are pushing for sanctions release in internal discussions, but it is mainly the slow bureaucratic process of the EU that is holding things back. It's not up to individual countries to make this policy change. The EU will have a meeting later this month to discuss and hopefully resole these issues. The US has already given a temporary waiver on many sanctions, who knows what Trump will do though.
But time is of the essence here and Syria desperately needs to start rebuilding their economy to not risk falling back to violence and displacement. A couple of more weeks of delay by the EU isn't going to turn things into a disaster - US, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and others in the region are already helping - but it is just creating unnecessary problems instead of taking advantage of the opportunity to build allies and help restore Syria.
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/...ia-oil-gas-banking-and-transport-on-the-table
Potentially lifting most sanctions by the end of the month then. Unless delisting HTS as a terrorist organization will be a roadblock.
Potentially lifting most sanctions by the end of the month then. Unless delisting HTS as a terrorist organization will be a roadblock.
Missed this story from last month:
Two Syrian doctors and a nurse told AFP in a series of interviews over the weekend that Bashar al-Assad's government coerced them into providing false testimony to international investigators after a deadly 2018 chlorine attack.
https://www.al-monitor.com/original...ere-coerced-false-chemical-attack-testimony-0
Syrian medics say were coerced into false chemical attack testimony
Two Syrian doctors and a nurse told AFP in a series of interviews over the weekend that Bashar al-Assad's government coerced them into providing false testimony to international investigators after a deadly 2018 chlorine attack.
https://www.al-monitor.com/original...ere-coerced-false-chemical-attack-testimony-0
Yes that’s been his position all along, and there’s no amount of evidence that will prompt him to reconsider.
Entirely unrelated, here’s a picture of “journalist” Aaron Mate as part of the
“International Delegation to the 2021 Syrian Presidential Election”
The delegation found that “the re-election of President Bashar al-Assad, of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party and the National Progressive Front, is the legitimate, democratic expression of the Syrian people.”
Bashar al-Assad won the election with 95.1% of the vote.
I was being a bit tongue in cheek, I am aware of Aaron Mate's background. That being said, he keeps saying that OCPW's own former staffers accuse the OCPW of a cover-up. I don't know if that has been debunked but it's quite a pervasive argument in pro-Assad circles.Yes that’s been his position all along, and there’s no amount of evidence that will prompt him to reconsider.
Entirely unrelated, here’s a picture of “journalist” Aaron Mate as part of the
“International Delegation to the 2021 Syrian Presidential Election”
The delegation found that “the re-election of President Bashar al-Assad, of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party and the National Progressive Front, is the legitimate, democratic expression of the Syrian people.”
Bashar al-Assad won the election with 95.1% of the vote.
Going to be interesting watching Syria develop over the coming years. New flag, new country.
Glad to hear that he is still alive. The importance of his work is in getting this evidence out of the country and to the public cannot be understated. The scale, and systematic nature of these killings and torture is just horrifying beyond words.
One of the big challenges for the new government is to get justice and punish those involved via court of law. Currently many former regime soldiers and prison workers are being tracked down and killed by civilians getting revenge (which isn't really surprising).
As for the sanctions, there was talk by the EU about a roadmap for lifting sanctions, starting with temporarily suspending sanctions on banking and energy sectors. I don't know if those suspensions have been implemented or not. Maybe it will be announced in more detail next week:
https://www.politico.eu/article/emmanuel-macron-speak-syrias-president-ahmad-al-sharaa/
https://www.reuters.com/world/middl...firings-privatization-state-firms-2025-01-31/
Islamist social-democrats was not on my bingo card for 2025.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025...-building-military-bases-in-syria-buffer-zone
An entirely logical thing to do.
An entirely logical thing to do.