Saudi Arabia hosted a large summit on Sunday — featuring American and European as well as Middle Eastern diplomats — to discuss the future of Syria, during which its officials called for lifting sanctions on the country to give its new regime a chance to recover from the civil war.
Syria is under one of the world’s most onerous sanctions regimes, intended to isolate deposed dictator Bashar Assad in response to more than a decade of human rights atrocities against his own people. Assad used disproportionate violence to shut down protests in 2011, prompting the Syrian Civil War, which at its peak featured ten different belligerent actors and created a vacuum for the Islamic State to build a “caliphate” centered around the northern city of Raqqa.
The civil war reached a somewhat dormant state after the collapse of the “caliphate” in 2017 that abruptly ended in November, when the al-Qaeda offshoot Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) attacked Assad forces in Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city. HTS rapidly seized control of Aleppo and marched deeper into Assad strongholds until reaching the outskirts of Damascus in early December, prompting Assad to flee to Russia and his regime to collapse. HTS is now the de facto government of Syria, led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly known by the jihadist nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Jolani. Sharaa has abandoned his war uniform and begun wearing Western-style suits, assuring that his terrorist organization would lead an “inclusive” government respectful of ethnic and religious minorities in the country. Sharaa has insisted that government would be Islamist, however, and scoldedthat “people who fear Islamic governance either have seen incorrect implementations of it or do not understand it properly.” (Read More)
