Will Washington ease sanctions on Syria’s new government? That question framed a hearing this week inside the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the congressional panel that oversees U.S. foreign policy.
The message was direct: Sanctions relief is not normalization. It is leverage.
A senior State Department official told Alhurra, the U.S.-funded Arabic-language network, “Sanctions relief is not normalization. It is conditional easing tied to verifiable steps.”
The hearing, titled “Syria at a Crossroads: U.S. Policy Challenges After Assad,” focused on the government of Ahmed al-Sharaa, the transitional leader who emerged after Bashar al-Assad’s fall. Rep. Brian Mast, a Republican lawmaker from Florida who chairs the committee, pressed officials on whether Damascus is meeting five conditions set by the Trump administration. Those include removing Iranian influence, ensuring the lasting defeat of the Islamic State group, protecting religious and ethnic minorities, and bringing all armed factions under state control.
Iran was central to the discussion. Rep. Thomas Kean Jr., a Republican from New Jersey, asked how economic incentives could be used to secure the withdrawal of Iranian forces and allied militias that have operated inside Syria for years. The State Department official responded that Iran’s exit is not a secondary issue. It is foundational. “If Syria becomes a permissive environment for Iranian power projection, there is no path to stability,” the official said.
Reconstruction is the second pressure point. Syria’s rebuilding costs are estimated at roughly $216 billion. James Jeffrey, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and former special envoy for Syria, told lawmakers that economic support must be directly tied to measurable political performance. “You cannot re-centralize power through coercion and expect reconstruction funding,” the official added, referring to concerns that Damascus could consolidate authority without reform.
Lawmakers also raised concerns about governance. Andrew Tabler, a Syria analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, warned that administrative stability does not equal political legitimacy. Nadine Maenza, a former U.S. commissioner on international religious freedom, argued that minority protection must be a formal condition for easing sanctions.
Rep. Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the committee, emphasized that lifting sanctions under the Caesar Act, the U.S. law that penalizes entities doing business with the Syrian government, would not be permanent. The restrictions could return quickly if Damascus fails to comply with the restrictions.
Mara Karlin, a former Pentagon official now at Johns Hopkins University, summarized the mood: Syria is “moving in the right direction, but the trajectory is not guaranteed.”
For now, Washington’s framework is clear. Economic incentives are available. Sanctions remain reversible.
Any reversal in behavior could mean not only frozen funding, but a swift return to diplomatic isolation.
The article is a translation of the original Arabic.
Rami Al Amine
A Lebanese writer and journalist living in the United States. He holds a master’s degree in Islamic-Christian Relations from the Faculty of Religious Sciences at Saint Joseph University in Beirut. He is the author of the poetry collection “I Am a Great Poet” (Dar Al-Nahda Al-Arabiya, 2007); the political pamphlet “Ya Ali, We Are No Longer the People of the South” (Lebanese Plans, 2008); a book on social media titled “The Facebookers” (Dar Al-Jadeed, 2012); and “The Pakistanis: A Statue’s Biography” (Dar Al-Nahda Al-Arabiya, 2024).
