Did EU, US sanctions stop aid deliveries? 

By Cathrin Schaer

The young Syrian woman has tears in her eyes. “We have no electricity, we have no gas, we have nothing,” she cries angrily into the camera. “And then the earthquake happened … not a single person tried to help us. Don’t let the media fool you,” she pleads, and shows a graphic of airspace over Syria as part of her video.

The graphic indicates that no planes with aid for earthquake survivors had yet landed in her country, a day after the devastating earthquake which hit northern Syria and south-eastern Turkey on February 6.Syria needs help, the young woman, who identifies herself as Patricia, a student from Damascus, rages into the camera.

But even before she had flashed the air traffic graphic on her TikTok video, which got more than 5 million views and over 240,000 mostly sympathetic comments, it had gone viral on various social media platforms. Most of those showing the graphic almost all used a variation of this hashtag: #StopSanctionsOnSyria.

Patricia’s widely viewed TikTok video is an excellent example of the confusion and emotion surrounding the topic of sanctions on Syria. As frustration about delays in aid and equipment reaching parts of earthquake-hit Syria have grown, many observers asked whether sanctions were to blame for the deadly hold up.

Some asking this question genuinely want to know how they can help. Others, say critics of the authoritarian Syrian government headed by dictator Bashar Assad, are cynically using the natural disaster.

There was certainly an increase in the use of Syria sanctions-related hashtags after the earthquake, say researchers at the Syrian Archive, which uses online verification to track war crimes in Syria. “But there’s no certainty as to whether these hashtags are deliberate [and part of a government-sponsored campaign] or organic,” a spokesperson for the Syrian Archive told DW.

“Just a general desire to help saw a lot of people participating in it. But it’s also clear that this campaign is welcomed by the Syrian government.” That aspect of it “is very deliberate,” Andrew Tabler, a senior fellow and Syria expert at US thinktank, the Washington Institute, told DW. “The regime and its supporters are using it [the earthquake] as an excuse to call for the lifting of all sanctions on Syria.”

That’s despite the fact that the opposition-controlled area of Idlib — the part of northern Syria that likely paid the highest price for delays, in terms of survivors who could have been rescued but perished — is not subject to sanctions imposed on the Syrian government anyway.

“Those areas have not been under the control of the Assad regime in over a decade,” Tabler pointed out.

That kind of context is missing in a lot of the content on social media. For example, in her TikTok video, Patricia from Damascus never talks about why there are international sanctions on Syria in the first place.

Sanctions were imposed on Syria by European countries and the US after the Assad regime sparked a civil war by brutally cracking down on peaceful anti-government demonstrations during the so-called Arab Spring, starting 2011. Twelve years later, the Syrian government, now in control of much of the country again, wants to rehabilitate its image and regain access to international markets.

Nor does Patricia mention the revised cybercrime law introduced by the Syrian government in April 2022 that means it is dangerous for ordinary Syrians to publish or post anything that might be critical of the government.

This article was provided by Deutsche Welle