5 hours ago
4
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.
Hours after the Assad dictatorship fell in Syria, business owner Rasin Katta got a call from a former business partner in Damascus.
“‘Rasin, we’re going to start working again,’” Mr. Katta recalled the partner telling him excitedly. “‘We can start preparing the factory.’”
Mr. Katta, whose family owned medical and pharmaceutical businesses, had left Syria for Germany during the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war. And he, too, was hopeful.
With President Bashar al-Assad gone, Mr. Katta had expected the United States and other Western countries to immediately lift economic sanctions on Syria, many of them targeting the Assad regime. But months passed and that did not happen.
Instead, the Trump administration set conditions to remove the sanctions, and the hopes of Mr. Katta and other business ownerswere dashed. On Tuesday night, their optimism was renewed, when President Trump announced during his visit to Saudi Arabia that the United States would end the Syria sanctions.
“We can move forward,” Mr. Katta said after hearing the news. “We can start planning.”
U.S. sanctions on Syria date back to the 1970s, when Washington declared the country a state sponsor of terrorism. Additional sanctions were imposed over the past 14 years in response to the Assad regime’s brutal crackdown on his own people during an anti-government uprising that began in 2011.
