Increase the pressure

How to increase the pressure on the Syrian government

Obama may oppose a no-fly zone but he can go after Bashar al-Assad in other ways. Here's how.

 By Peter Harrell

Five years into Syria’s bloody civil war, it is clear that there is no appetite in Washington or European capitals for a more muscular military intervention to stop the Assad regime’s war crimes. But there is no excuse for Washington’s and Brussels’ failure to ramp up sanctions on President Bashar Assad as he continues to massacre his own people.

A new United Nations investigation recently found that Assad used chlorine gas as a chemical weapon — a clear violation of the agreement that Assad struck in 2013 to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons program. The U.N. report came shortly after the world was shocked by the image of a Syrian child in the back of an ambulance, bloodied by Assad’s bombing of Aleppo. Despite recent calls by diplomats for the U.N. to impose sanctions on Syria, Russia’s support for its allies in Damascus means the odds of U.N. sanctions are negligible. The U.S. and Europe should respond by intensifying our own independent pressure on the Assad regime and its international backers.

What would more pressure on the Assad regime look like?

First, Congress, the Treasury Department and European sanctions officials should work to establish new sanctions programs targeting business between Syria and the rest of the world. U.S. and European sanctions currently prohibit most business between the U.S. and the European Union and Syria, but sanctions authorities to target companies in third countries that engage in business with Assad are relatively limited. The U.S. and EU should adopt broad sanctions authorities creating the legal basis to sanction virtually all non-humanitarian business or financial transactions with the Assad regime, deterring remaining international business with Assad.

Second, both Washington and the EU need to get more aggressive about actually implementing sanctions on the Assad regime and its cronies. Although the U.S. and EU were aggressive in implementing and enforcing the existing Syria sanctions during the early phases of the Syrian civil war, more recently the pace of sanctions designations has dropped off. The United States has issued only one round of sanctions designations targeting the Assad regime’s supporters so far in 2016, adding just eight individuals and seven companies to U.S. sanctions lists this past July. (In April the Treasury Department also sanctioned several Syrians as part of sanctions targeting the Hezbollah terrorist group.) The EU has had a similarly modest pace of designations this year. A more aggressive effort to regularly sanction companies doing business with the Syrian regime would keep up the pressure on Assad’s backers to demonstrate international resolve to tightening the economic screws on Assad.

Finally, the U.S. government needs to overhaul its strategy for tackling the support that Assad’s two key backers, Iran and Russia, provide. Secretary of State John Kerry has sought to walk a delicate line between pressuring Iran and Russia over their support for Assad and encouraging both governments to persuade Assad to agree to a durable cease-fire and a meaningful diplomatic process to end Syria’s civil war. To date, the U.S. has mostly focused on the encouragement side of the ledger: The U.S., for example, has held out the potential for military cooperation with Russia in Syria as an incentive for Russia to pressure Assad into agreeing to a cease-fire with Western-backed rebel groups. And Kerry may also be wary of taking steps that the Iranians could view as jeopardizing the Iran nuclear deal that went into effect early this year. But with no end to Assad’s butchery in sight, it is time to deliver a clear ultimatum to Tehran and Moscow that if they do not get serious about the diplomatic track, the U.S. and our allies will have to get serious about sanctions on the government ministries and supply lines that are moving weapons into Damascus.

Of course, as the U.S. and EU move toward a more aggressive sanctions posture against Assad, we also need a strategy to mitigate the unintended humanitarian impacts of our sanctions. NGOs working to provide humanitarian relief in Syria report that sanctions have affected their ability to move money and relief supplies in and out of the country. The U.S. Treasury and European regulators should work with a coalition of well-regarded international NGOs to establish a “humanitarian channel” to enable money and relief to flow into Syria, much as the U.S. established a dedicated “humanitarian channel” enabling Iran to purchase food and medicine beginning in 2013.

The sad reality is that sanctions alone cannot force Assad to cease his atrocities against the Syrian people. But a more aggressive sanctions campaign can increase the costs that Assad and his international backers must bear and, if executed well, begin to deter the worst of Assad’s humanitarian atrocities.