The United States has adopted a series of new sanctions against the Syrian government, of unprecedented hardness and scope. These provisions, recently passed by the Congress, after three years of unsuccessful efforts, are part of the finance law that the American president, Donald Trump, signed Friday December 20, before flying for Florida where he will spend the Christmas and New Year.
This arsenal of anti-Assad measures is the result of the revelations of a photographer of the Syrian military police who had defected in the middle of the civil war, taking with him a stock of 55,000 photos. Photos taken in the jails of the Syrian regime, showing corpses of prisoners, skin on bones, body often covered with traces of torture, dead from hunger, illness or torture: proof of the routine barbarity of the Syrian regime.
Before the Congress, where he has testified four times since July 2014, the forensic photographer, codenamed "Caesar", denounced the war crimes perpetrated by the Damascus authorities on a scale qualified as ""Industrial". His message was relayed by American-Syrian associations, which have successfully forged a coalition of elected Democrats and Republicans determined to toughen the sanctions already in place against the Syrian regime.
Deterring foreign investors
Those contained in the text signed by Donald Trump have the particularity of targeting states and third-party companies that trade with the Syrian authorities. Like the measures voted against Iran, the "Caesar law" obliges the President of the United States to place under sanctions any foreign entity which "Provides significant support to the Syrian government or conducts significant transactions with it".
Behind this particularly extensive formulation, the text specifies that the threat applies to certain key sectors such as oil, construction, aeronautics and finance. The new legislation notably obliges the American administration to " determine whether the Central Bank of Syria is engaged in money laundering and, if so, in imposing sanctions on the institution. "
The law also calls for tougher sanctions against people and entities "Responsible or accomplices" human rights abuses in Syria and to support the collection of evidence of these violations. "After three and a half years of pushing for the adoption of this law, we hope that justice will finally be done for the Syrian people", welcomed Zaki Lababidi, president of the Syrian American Council. "The Caesar law is the first step towards a non-violent resolution of the Syrian conflict", the NGO and other American-Syrian organizations said in a joint statement.
