President Trump declared Tuesday that he would raise US sanctions on Syria, throwing an anchor of economic life to a country devastated for almost 14 years of civil war and decades of dictatorship under the Assad family.
Trump should have met for the first time with the new president of Syria, Ahmed Al-Shara, Wednesday in Saudi Arabia, where the American leader is making the first great state visit of his second term. Al-Shara led the rebel alliance that expelled President Bashar al-Assad in Syria in December.
The President of the United States made the announcement surprisingly to end the penalties while turned to a commercial forum in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, where the crowd broke out in applause and gave him a standing ovation.
The decision represents a change of sea for Syria, breaking the economic narrow on a country seen as a fundamental for the stability of the Middle East.
“There is a new government that, hopefully, will be able to stabilize the country and maintain peace,” said Trump. “This is what we want to see in Syria.”
On the other side of Syria, people poured into the streets of the main cities to cheer up the news that hopes to alleviate the overwhelming poverty that most of the population has to face.
The Foreign Minister of Syria, Asad Hassan al-Shaibani, greeted the move as “a new beginning on the path towards reconstruction” and praised Saudi Arabia as “voice of reason and wisdom” in the region. He did not mention the United States directly.
From Mr. Al-Assad's Ouster, the Syrians claimed that the fall of the regime should end the penalties.
“The sanctions were implemented as a response to the crimes committed by the previous regime against the people,” said Al-Shara to the New York Times in an interview last month.
Many of the penalties were implemented in response to the brutal repression of the Government of Assad on a revolt that began in 2011 and went down to a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands.
“The sanctions were implemented as a response to the crimes committed by the previous regime against the people,” said Al-Shara to the New York Times in an interview last month.
Trump said he was made to the decision after talking to the president of Türkiye, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who supported the anti-Assad insurrection and the hereditary prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed Bin Salman.
Trump tried to play the Saudi investments in the United States and the Saudi Prince said this week he would have worked to increase the total commitment of Riyadh to $ 1 trillion from $ 600 billion, as requested by the president.
“I will order the cessation of sanctions on Syria,” Trump said Tuesday, speaking in front of giant projections of the US flags and Saudi to an audience sitting under a huge chandelier. “Oh, what I do for the hereditary prince,” he added, attracting laughter with an enthusiastic crowd.
Trump, who cultivated close diplomatic and commercial relations with the kingdom, landed in Riyadh for a sumptuous welcome. The Saudis launched an honor guard, an Arab horsepower and a crowd of real and corporate leaders to greet him.
The welcoming relations between Mr. Trump and the Kingdom have offered the leaders of the Gulf the opportunity to push for the revocation of the sanctions on Syria, which many of them see as fundamental to suffer from economic collapse and prevent new conflicts that could spread beyond its borders.
“The Syrian economy is in pieces, but the region is in the balance, if not desperate, to help her put it back on her feet,” wrote Charles Lister, an elderly member of the Washington Middle East. “With the US penalties out of hand, Syria for the first time in decades will be able to look forward towards recovery, reconstruction and reintegration into the world”.
In the Syrian capital, Damascus, thousands of celebrations gathered in the central Omayyad square, won the Syrian and Saudi flags while the fireworks are extinguished. Some sang revolutionary slogans against Mr. Al-Assad. And they expressed joy for the fact that their country could soon be able to reintegrate themselves into the global financial system and start reconstructing.
“Things will become cheaper,” an 49-year-old employee of the local government said Intisar al-Moussa. “We will be able to buy our children the things they want and give them good education. We will be like other countries.”
He had come to the square with his sister, brother, mother and other relatives to celebrate and said that the announcement had changed his idea of Mr. Trump.
“We didn't really like Trump before, but now we love him because he stayed with us,” he said.
He also had another desire: “We hope that our salaries will go up a bit”.
The crowds celebrated in the main cities of Homs and Aleppo.
It was not yet clear how wide is of a meeting that the President of the United States could have on Wednesday with Mr. Al-Shara. An official of the White House said that Trump agreed to “greet” the Syrian leader while both were in Saudi Arabia, according to the press pool that traveled with the President of the United States.
In his speech Tuesday, Trump crossed Iran, one of the main international allies of Assad's osterome dictatorship. He defined the country “the largest and most destructive” strength that threatened the stability and prosperity of the Middle East and promised that he would never have a nuclear weapon.
If Mr. Al-Shara receives a face-to-face meeting with Mr. Trump, he will have a rare opportunity to make his case to a world leader with the power to drastically model the future of Syria. It would also be an extraordinary turnaround for the man who once led a branch of Al Qaeda before breaking the ties with the jihadist group, trying to moderate his image in the hope of obtaining a wider traction.
In the months in which a rebellious coalition seized the control of Damascus and overturned Mr. Al-Assad, the United States kept a regime of multilayer sanctions which, with the war, prompted the country to the verge of economic collapse.
The critics of US sanctions claimed that lifting them could allow a flow of international aid and investments necessary to help the country recover from the war.
European leaders, eager to encourage stability and prevent new waves of migration on their coasts, have also pushed for greater economic commitment.
However, even if Europe began to raise some penalties, few companies or regional governments had been willing to invest in the country with the weight of US sanctions – and without knowing if Mr. Trump would have raised.
The Trump administration for months has distanced himself from the nascent administration of Mr. Al-Shara. Some US officials have expressed profound skepticism of the reasons of Al -hara and its promises to protect religious minorities, indicating its orientation and its Islamist history with Al Qaeda.
The American administration had also issued requests relating to anti -terrorism and other issues that are said to be satisfied to be considered the sanctions. The Syrian government stated that some of the requests, such as a ban on foreign fighters in the Syrian government and in the armed forces, must be negotiated. But at the same time, he moved to other requests.
Syria has recently brought a team of Qatar forensic experts to look for the remains of the Americans killed by the Islamic State.
And Syrian officials told American intermediaries that they had tried to avoid conflicts with all neighboring countries, including Israel, and welcomed American investments.
For months, regional and European leaders had fought to attract attention from the Trump administration on the question of sanctions. But the tide had started to move recently. Mr. Trump mentioned before his trip to the Middle East who would reconsider the problem.
Last week, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, offered a diplomatic push to Mr. Al-Shara, as the first European leader to host the Syrian president in its capital, judging to gradually lift the sanctions of the European Union on Syria, provided that the new leaders keep the country in progress towards stability.
“I told the Syrian president that if he had continued to follow his path, we would have continued our own,” said Macron.
Eric Schmitt Relationships contributed by Washington.