Salaries will go up. Bread and fuel will be cheaper. The electricity will come on for more than a few hours per day. The reconstruction of destroyed towns and cities will begin.
President Donald Trump’s announcement in a speech in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday that he would lift US sanctions on Syria unleashed hope across the country that life would improve after more than a decade of war and deprivation.
“It will put us at ease,” said Sami al-Hajj, a pharmacist. “Before, we were scared for the future, for us and our children. But this will open up opportunities.”
Analysts and many others in Syria see lifting US sanctions as crucial to enabling the new government to rebuild an economy decimated by war. The sanctions effectively cut Syria out of the international banking system and isolated it from the global economy, blocking money transfers, restricting imports and barring activity by most global firms.
On Wednesday, Trump also met Syria’s president, Ahmed al-Shara, a former rebel leader who spearheaded the campaign that toppled the strongman Bashar al-Assad in December.
It was the first time in 25 years the leaders of the two countries had met. The conversation, which lasted about half an hour, granted another stamp of recognition to al-Shara, who is still designated as a terrorist by the US government for his past affiliation with al Qaida.
In a social media post after the meeting, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that Trump had urged al-Shara to reach a peace accord with Israel, expel foreign terrorists, help the US fight the Islamic State and take over detention centres that hold Islamic State militants in northeastern Syria. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was expected to meet al-Shara’s foreign minister to discuss the details.
The Syrian government lauded the meeting in a statement as “historic”, and said it had addressed “avenues for Syrian-American partnership”, including in counterterrorism.
The US has imposed sanctions on Syria for decades. But more were added during the war to punish al-Assad for his brutal efforts to suppress a popular uprising in 2011 and to quash the rebels who ended up overthrowing him. By the time al-Shara and aligned groups took control, swathes of Syria had been destroyed.
A UN report found that nine out of 10 Syrians lived in poverty and that the country’s economic output was one-quarter of what it had been before the war. At its current growth rate, the report said, Syria would not return to its pre-war economic output before 2080.