Amongst all the noise and activity in the Middle East this week with President Trump’s arrival, there’s one thing in particular that stands out. For me, as somebody who has been in and out of Syria for the last 12 years, Trump’s meeting with Ahmed Al Shaara, the new Syrian president, was of huge importance.
There are many criticisms to be made of the new US president, and I’ve made plenty of them, but in this instance he was spot on. By lifting sanctions and telling the Syrians and Israelis they must sort out a way to co-exist, Trump did exactly the right things. And this could be a time window in which an Israeli-Syrian accord might be forged: on my recent visit to Damascus, I was struck by the fact that most of the new Syrian government freely acknowledged that the Israelis’ decapitation of the Iranian proxy Hezbollah was a major factor in the fall of the Assad regime. Hezbollah gunmen were one of the most important things keeping the old regime in power, and the Israelis’ effective action against them helped to end decades of murderous oppression in Syria.
The end of sanctions is vital, too. When I travelled around Syria a few months ago with members of the hugely influential British Syrian diaspora, visiting hospitals and local businesses, the universal ask from everyone was “lift the sanctions”. In the main hospital in Homs, most of the MRI machines sat silent because sanctions left them without parts and maintenance schedules. The UK government did lift some sanctions early on, but the cuts to the foreign aid budgets in the UK and US means that little in material terms has been done to get this country back on its feet thus far.
Amongst all the noise and activity in the Middle East this week with President Trump’s arrival, there’s one thing in particular that stands out. For me, as somebody who has been in and out of Syria for the last 12 years, Trump’s meeting with Ahmed Al Shaara, the new Syrian president, was of huge importance.
There are many criticisms to be made of the new US president, and I’ve made plenty of them, but in this instance he was spot on. By lifting sanctions and telling the Syrians and Israelis they must sort out a way to co-exist, Trump did exactly the right things. And this could be a time window in which an Israeli-Syrian accord might be forged: on my recent visit to Damascus, I was struck by the fact that most of the new Syrian government freely acknowledged that the Israelis’ decapitation of the Iranian proxy Hezbollah was a major factor in the fall of the Assad regime. Hezbollah gunmen were one of the most important things keeping the old regime in power, and the Israelis’ effective action against them helped to end decades of murderous oppression in Syria.
The end of sanctions is vital, too. When I travelled around Syria a few months ago with members of the hugely influential British Syrian diaspora, visiting hospitals and local businesses, the universal ask from everyone was “lift the sanctions”. In the main hospital in Homs, most of the MRI machines sat silent because sanctions left them without parts and maintenance schedules. The UK government did lift some sanctions early on, but the cuts to the foreign aid budgets in the UK and US means that little in material terms has been done to get this country back on its feet thus far.