The United States moves to relieve sanctions on Syria to Trump

Cnn
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The Trump administration gave the order to relieve the sanctions against Syria on Friday and marked an important political shift after US President Donald Trump had obliged the measures to reset the measures during a trip to the Middle East.

The Trump government officers had carried out calm commitments for months to pave the way for sanctions in order to help the nation after the fall of the repressed leader Bashar al-Assad to recover and rebuild years of devastating war.

On Friday, the US Ministry of Finance said that Syria had issued a general license, approved the transactions in which the preliminary Syrian government is involved, as well as the central bank and the state companies.

The GL25 license “approved transactions, which are prohibited by the Syria sanctions, effectively raise sanctions on Syria” and “new investments and activities of the private sector in accordance with the first strategy of the president of the president,” she said in a press release.

After the Caesar Act, the U.S. State Department also accepted an 180-day waiver to ensure that the sanctions do not hinder investments and to advance recovery and reconstruction in Syria, Foreign Minister Marco Rubio said in a statement.

Rubio said that the exemptions will make it easier to provide electricity, energy, water and hygiene and enable more effective humanitarian reaction throughout Syria.

“Today's actions are the first step to meet the president's vision for a new relationship between Syria and the United States,” said Rubio.

During his last week in Saudi Arabia, where he met Syria's interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa, Trump announced that sanctions against Syria would be quickly removed, some of the officials surprised and a scramble was triggered by the US government to implement the decision to implement the decision.

Shortly afterwards, Rubio said the United States would issue exceptions to Syrian sanctions that are currently required by law. In the meantime, the administration is involved in a complicated technical review of the sanctions, which is expected to take weeks, civil servants said at this time.

“If we make enough progress, we would like to see the law abolished because they have difficulty finding people who invest in a country when sanctions come back in six months. We are not there yet. That is premature,” said Rubio.

In Saudi Arabia, Trump said that he had made the decision to increase sanctions after talking to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The Saudi officials had coordinated for months behind the scenes on this topic, so that the removal of sanctions would increase the Syrian economy and contribute to stabilizing the entire region.

The Turkish government also had contacts with the United States via Syria and knew that the work was done to determine whether sanctions were canceled, according to a source familiar with the matter. The Turkish government expressed support for these efforts.

But not all US allies in the region were in favor of where Trump was led: Israel had opposed the move and Trump ignored their objections.

An Israeli official previously said CNN when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Trump met in Washington in April, he asked the President to remove no sanctions on Syria, and feared that this would lead to a repeating of events of October 7, 2023, as a Hamas-led militant Israel.

Trump admitted last week that he had “not asked” Israel after facing the sanctions in Syria.

“I thought it was the right thing,” he said when he put his tour through the Middle East.