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The US Treasury Department Thursday decided to suspend for six months one of the many international sanctions imposed on Syria for years to push the authoritarian president Bashar al Assad to peacefully resolve the civil war, which has been going on for over a decade. The purpose of the suspension is to facilitate the arrival of aid to the population affected by the very serious earthquake that occurred in the night between Sunday and Monday: it caused the death of at least 28,000 people, including 3,500 in Syriabut it is a provisional estimate, because entire buildings have collapsed and there are still thousands missing under the rubble.
American sanctions already provided for exceptions for humanitarian aid, but now it will be easier to organize it. In fact, the Treasury Department has decided to allow that all economic transactions linked to humanitarian initiatives do not have to be approved by a specific office, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), before being carried out: possibly they must only be justified afterwards in the event of a request from OFAC.
In practice, it means that aid organizations and organizations and companies interested in donating money to affected areas will not have to prove to OFAC that they are not violating sanctions before sending their support.
The problems related to the earthquake are particularly complicated in Syria, already devastated by the long civil war. The earthquake hit the north-west of the country in particular, in the region controlled by rebels opposed to the Assad regime. Now this part of Syria, where hundreds of thousands of people have been left homeless, is difficult to reach given that the routes used in recent years to bypass central government controls passed through southern Turkey, currently badly damaged by the earthquake.
Assad had demanded to handle all humanitarian aid to Syria, including for the rebel-occupied northwest, and there were fears he could use it as a weapon of blackmail. Syrian state media said on Friday evening that the government had given the green light for aid to flow in from all parts of the country. The decision could facilitate the arrival of aid, but secondo Martin Griffithshead of the UN office for humanitarian aid and emergencies, the news should be taken with caution because for the moment the authorization has not been given for the transport of aid to the rebel territories from across the border, but only from the rest of the country.
Currently the only authorized access route from abroad to the Idlib region, controlled by the rebels, passes through the Bab al Hawa border crossing between Syria and Turkey. UN aid comes either through that passage or from Damascus, the Syrian capital. The United Nations has asked Syria and its allies (including Russia) to also allow passage through another point on the Turkish border, the Bab al Salameh border, and through Iraq to Kurdish-controlled areas.
As for the suspension of one of the sanctions by the United States, for now it is not clear how effective it will be because the companies that handle the transactions could still slow them down for fear of violating the others, which remain in force and which neither the US government nor do the countries of the European Union currently seem willing to remove.
– Read also: How to help earthquake victims in Syria and Turkey, from here