The Washington Post Finally Admits That Sanctions on Syria Harm Civilians.

Now that Assad is gone, the mainstream media is admitting that the Syria sanctions were harming civilians.

Washington Post Finally Tells The Truth About Syria Sanctions

The official narrative in Washington and mainstream media before the fall of the Assad regime has been that the sanctions on Syria were only targeting Assad and did not impact regular Syrian civilians.

This was clearly false, as the UN sanctions expert Alena Douhan found in 2022, the “unilateral sanctions (in Syria) on key economic sectors, including oil, gas, electricity, trade, construction, and engineering have quashed national income, and undermined efforts towards economic recovery and reconstruction.”

Douhan concluded in her report that the sanctions on Syria “severely harm human rights and prevent any efforts for early recovery, rebuilding, and reconstruction” and that they helped lead to “90 percent of Syria’s population living below the poverty line, with limited access to food, water, electricity, shelter, cooking and heating fuel, transportation, and healthcare”.

It has also long been documented that the sanctions targeted the Syrian healthcare system, as The American Prospect reported, Syrian doctors were forced to smuggle in medical equipment that was blocked because of American sanctions.

However before Assad fell in Syria, mainstream media outlets denied the reality of what these sanctions actually did. For example, an op-ed in the Washington Post published in 2023 falsely claimed that the American sanctions on Syria were only designed to “limit Assad’s ability to finance his military and militias”.

Journalist Aaron Mate found multiple examples of the Washington Post’s ultra-hawkish neocon writer Josh Rogin advocating for harsher sanctions on Syria in the name of “isolating the Assad regime”.

However now that Assad is gone, the Washington Post can finally admit the truth about the sanctions. In a recent article titled “International sanctions have left Syria’s health system on life support,” they finally admit that the sanctions only harmed regular Syrian civilians and had no real impact on the Assad regime.

In the piece, the Post reported that:

American and European Union sanctions aimed at punishing the regime of President Bashar al-Assad have weakened the medical system that millions of Syrians rely on — preventing hospitals from maintaining or importing lifesaving diagnostic machines and making it more difficult to provide timely treatment to the wounded and the sick.

The Post finally admits that the Syria sanctions harmed the Syrian healthcare system reporting that

MRI and CT scanners have fallen out of service and are hard to replace. Laboratories lack equipment. The domestic pharmaceutical industry that once covered up to 90 percent of the local market has all but collapsed, leaving pharmacy shelves filled with imported, expensive, and sometimes poor-quality drugs.

The piece even admitted that the Syrian government was able to circumvent the sanctions while they caused regular Syrians to suffer writing:

In the days after Assad fled, Syrians finally learned how well the family had lived. Rooms were topped with crystal chandeliers, and basements were full of luxury cars. The powerful had found their way around the sanctions, it seemed; the public, meanwhile, had been left to suffer.

The reality is that the sanctions on Syria were never designed to harm the Assad regime and were intended to hurt average Syrians in the hope that it would lead to regime change after the billion-dollar CIA regime change war in Syria failed.

As Defense Department official Dana Stroul admitted in a moment of honesty, the U.S. militarily occupied and “owned” Syria’s “resource-rich economic powerhouse” and put “economic sanctions” on Syria with the goal of blocking “reconstruction aid” in order to keep Syria in “rubble”.

Many people understandably despise the Assad regime in Syria for its human rights abuses and corruption, but no matter one’s view on the Syrian government there is no arguing that this type of siege warfare designed to keep the Syrian population in misery is wrong.

Syria Is Not The Only Country This Strategy Is Being Used On.

Now that the Assad regime has fallen and the U.S. is lifting some sanctions on Syria, mainstream media is finally admitting that they targeted civilians, but what they will not report is that they are still using this strategy in many other countries targeted by Washinton neocons for regime change.

Take Iran for example where the U.S. has implemented the same siege warfare strategy on civilians. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo admitted in 2019 that the American sanctions on Iran were designed to make the situation “much worse for the Iranian people” in hopes that they would “rise up and change the behavior of the regime”.

Human Rights Watch found that the American sanctions on Iran

drastically constrained the ability of the country to finance humanitarian imports, including medicines, causing serious hardships for ordinary Iranians and threatening their right to health.

One of the most barbaric examples of this siege warfare strategy is the American sanctions on Venezuela. A study from the Centre For Economic Policy Research found that the American sanctions on Venezuela have caused “40,000 deaths from 2017 to 2018”.

A report from the former UN Rapporteur on Human Rights, Alfred de Zayas found that overall the sanctions have killed 100,000 people in Venezuela.

These findings were confirmed in a lengthy report from the Venezuelan opposition economist Francisco Rodríguez which found that U.S. sanctions correlated with Venezuela’s inability to recover its oil production, a major factor driving their economy.

Pictured Above: Chart from Fransico Rodriguez Study

As demonstrated in Rodfriguez’s study above, every time Venezuela’s oil production was beginning to stabilize, the U.S. imposed sanctions that caused it to crash again.

The United Nations reported that the sanctions on Venezuela have “a devastating effect on the whole population of Venezuela, especially those in extreme poverty, women, children, medical workers, people with disabilities or life-threatening or chronic diseases, and the indigenous population.”

Another example of brutal American sanctions are the ones on Afghanistan. Some gave the Biden administration credit for withdrawing from the country as an anti-war move, but what they ignore is the fact that he replaced the occupation with sanctions that Foreign Policy magazine reported left “around half of Afghanistan’s 40.2 million people at crisis or emergency levels of food security”.

The Intercept’s Murtaza Hussian reported in 2022 that the U.S. sanctions in Afghanistan caused children to “bear the brunt of the humanitarian catastrophe, punctuated by horrifying stories of kids being sold to pay for food.” He also reported that the sanctions resulted in “Afghans freezing to death as they fled the country with their families.”

These examples are only a sample size of what U.S. sanctions are doing around the world, in 2023 the list of countries sanctioned by the United States in total included Cuba, China, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Russia, Nicaragua and many other countries.

Sanctions are Siege Warfare.

Many mainstream pundits are now calling for the United States to lift sanctions on Syria now that Assad is gone. I fully agree that the Syria sanctions should be lifted but so should all U.S. sanctions. The reality is these sanctions are placed to keep the targeted countries’ populations miserable in a siege warfare strategy to force regime change. Many of the targeted governments may be unpopular to many, but these sanctions never actually harm corrupt government officials and always end up hurting the most vulnerable in the targeted countries.