The US-imposed Caesar Act took effect in mid-June, installing sanctions against Syrian regime’s top officials - including Assad and his wife - and regime-linked entities.
The sustained campaign of economic and political pressure is aimed at denying the Assad regime the revenue and support it has used to commit crimes against the Syrian people. However, many argue it has exacerbated the economic hardships ordinary Syrian civilians are already facing.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement on Wednesday that they have sanctioned a list of 14 individuals and entities. The list includes Assad’s eldest son, Hafez, who was born in 2001.
“Today, the State Department and Treasury Department continued the United States’ sanctions campaign against the Assad regime by releasing 14 new designations under the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act and other authorities,” read the statement.
“We have named today’s tranche of designations the Hama and Maarat Al-Numan sanctions. These names are meant to memorialize the victims of two of the Assad regime’s most notorious atrocities, both of which occurred in this week in 2011 and 2019,” it said, adding that both incidents took the lives of hundreds of Syrians.
The US deputy assistant secretary of state, Joel Rayburn, told the Guardian that Assad’s teenage son was targeted, because “there has been a trend of senior Syrian regime actors and business people who have been active in the regime to do business through their adult family members to evade sanctions.”
“It seems very clear that the immediate family of Bashar al-Assad and their in-laws are attempting to consolidate economic power inside Syria so that they could use this to further consolidate political power,” he added.
The Syrian foreign ministry slammed the implementation of the first batch of the sanctions last month, claiming it violates international law and norms.
“The US administration talking about human rights in Syria exceeds the ugliest forms of lies and hypocrisy as embodied in its policy of supporting terrorism that shed the blood of the Syrians and destroyed their achievements,” it said.
Syria has been embroiled in unrest for much of the last nine years, since peaceful protests against Assad and his government escalated into a multi-sided civil war, involving multiple countries. Presently, the country is largely under the control of three main parties: regime-held areas, Kurdish-held areas and areas controlled by pro-Turkey militants.
The Caesar Act is named after a former Syrian military photographer, who fled the country in 2014 with tens of thousands of images displaying the brutality and torture taking place in Assad regime jails.
