Syria welcomes US decision to ease Assad-era sanctions as ‘positive step'
Syria considers the move by the Trump administration to ease sanctions imposed on the war-torn country as a 'positive step' to ease humanitarian and economic suffering, its foreign ministry said Saturday.
In a statement, the ministry said Syria 'extends its hand' to anyone that wants to cooperate with Damascus, on the condition that there is no intervention in the country's internal affairs.
The statement came after the Trump administration granted Syria sweeping exemptions from sanctions on Friday in a major first step toward fulfilling the president's pledge to lift a half-century of penalties on a country shattered by 14 years of civil war.
Thomas Barrack , the US ambassador to Turkey who has also been appointed as special envoy for Syria, met with Syria's president and foreign minister during their visit to Turkey on Saturday, adding the President Ahmad al-Sharaa welcomed Washington's 'fast action on lifting sanctions.'
'President Trump's goal is to enable the new government to create the conditions for the Syrian people to not only survive but thrive,' Barrack said in a statement.
Barrack said he stressed that the cessation of sanctions against Syria will preserve the integrity 'of our primary objective — the enduring defeat of' the Islamic State group, also known as IS or ISIS. He added that it will give Syrians a chance for a better future.
'I also commended President al-Sharaa on taking meaningful steps towards enacting President Trump's points on foreign terrorist fighters, counter-ISIS measures, relations with Israel, and camps and detention centers in Northeast Syria,' Barrack said.
He was referring to detention centers where thousands of IS members are held and two camps where their families stay in areas currently controlled by the U.S.-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.
A measure by the State Department waived for six months a tough set of sanctions imposed by Congress in 2019. A Treasury Department action suspended enforcement of sanctions against anyone doing business with a range of Syrian individuals and entities, including Syria's central bank.
The congressional sanctions, known as the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, had aimed to isolate Syria's previous rulers by effectively expelling those doing business with them from the global financial system.
They specifically block postwar reconstruction, so while they can be waived for 180 days by executive order, investors are likely to be wary of reconstruction projects when sanctions could be reinstated after six months.
The Trump administration said Friday's actions were 'just one part of a broader U.S. government effort to remove the full architecture of sanctions.' Those penalties had been imposed on the Assad family for their support of Iranian-backed militias, their chemical weapons program and abuses of civilians.
Trump said during a visit to the region earlier this month that the U.S. would roll back the heavy financial penalties in a bid to give the interim government a better chance of survival.
Damascus resident Nael Kaddah said now that the sanctions are being eased, the country will flourish again. He said Syrians will be able to transfer money freely, unlike in the past when there were several companies that monopolized the business and took large commissions on transfers.
'Now any citizen can receive a transfer from anywhere in the world,' he said.
Syria's foreign ministry said dialogue and diplomacy are the best way to build 'balanced relations that achieve the interest of the people and strengthen security and stability in the region.'
It added that the coming period in Syria will be reconstruction and restoring 'Syria's natural status' in the region and around the world.
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DAMASCUS—The resemblance was striking. The boy in the photograph had the family's same thick eyebrows and looked about 17, the same age Ahmed Yaseen would now be—if he was still alive. Could it be him, his aunt Naila al-Abbasi wondered? More than 12 years had passed since the boy and his five sisters had disappeared, after Syrian military intelligence detained them and their parents in the early years of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad. Six months after rebels toppled the Assad regime in a seismic moment for the Middle East, many Syrians are still searching for missing relatives, including an estimated 3,700 children. An investigation by The Wall Street Journal, based on secret documents from the Assad regime and conversations with former detainees and corroborated by Syria's current government, found that at least 300 children like Ahmed were forcibly separated from their families and placed in orphanages after being detained during the country's civil war. 'He looks very similar," said al-Abbasi, who had scrolled through hundreds of photographs on Syrian orphanages' websites before finding this one. 'The nose, even the mouth." More than 112,000 Syrians arrested since the start of an uprising against Assad in 2011 remain unaccounted for, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights. That figure is comparable to the number of people who have disappeared in Mexico's drug wars, though Syria's population is only a fifth the size. Children are often used to punish or pressure opponents in war. Russia has taken thousands of children from Ukraine. Decades after Argentina's military dictatorship ended, families are still finding missing relatives seized as newborns and adopted by military couples. Dealing with this brutal legacy is a crucial challenge for the new Syria, whose government, led by an Islamist group that cut its past ties with al Qaeda, is trying to assert its control over a country riven by sectarian tensions. Syria's presidency said in May that it will set up commissions to probe crimes committed under Assad, compensate victims and trace the missing. But it is a huge and complex task for a government beset with other pressing issues, including a battered economy. Failure to address the issue of missing people 'could contribute to cycles of violence," said Kathryne Bomberger, director general of the International Commission on Missing Persons. At the time of their abduction, the Yaseen children were living in the relatively affluent Dumar neighborhood of Damascus. Their mother, Rania al-Abbasi, was a national chess champion who ran a successful dental clinic. In photographs Rania posted on social media, the children are pictured smiling alongside SpongeBob and Spider-Man performers during a trip to Syria's coast. Other pictures show Ahmed on a playground swing; wearing a cardboard crown; and with his hair gelled neatly into a crest. When the uprising against Assad began, relatives urged them to leave Syria. The family had a history with the regime: Rania's father—a prominent religious scholar—had spent 13 years in prison under Assad's father, President Hafez al-Assad, because of his oppositional views. Islamists were often considered a threat by the secular Assad regime. After Rania's father was released, the family went into exile in Saudi Arabia, where Ahmed was born. But his parents wanted to raise him and his sisters where they had roots and returned to Damascus in 2009. 'She thought she was safe," said Rania's younger sister, Naila, a doctor who remained in Saudi Arabia with much of the family. Between six children and work, Rania had no time to get involved in political activity or protests, even if she supported their demands. But she did give generously to Syrians displaced by the government's crackdown. And her father, from abroad, had voiced support for the uprising. It was enough to bring the regime's fist down on the family. On March 9, 2013, Syrian intelligence agents came for Rania's husband, Abdurrahman Yaseen. Two days later, they returned and took Ahmed and the other children, between 1 and 14 years old, along with their mother. The father's fate eventually came to light in a cache of 50,000 images smuggled out of Syria by a forensic photographer who defected in 2013. The grim catalog contained photographs of some 6,786 Syrians who had died in custody, some with their eyes gouged out. Among the images was one of Abdurrahman. Still, there was no sign of Ahmed, his siblings or Rania. The strongest lead came from another mother who had been detained with her children the year after al-Abbasi and her family. Freed in a prisoner exchange in 2017, Rasha al-Sharbaji revealed that security services had seized her five children and placed them in an orphanage run by SOS Children's Villages, an international charity with several locations in Syria. She said she recovered her children from the charity after being released. Asking around, relatives learned that four sisters with age gaps similar to four of the Yaseen girls were living in one of the centers of SOS Children's Villages. But orphanage staff were too afraid to speak, according to family members, and a lawyer appointed to ask the authorities received no answers. After the regime crumbled in December, thousands of prisoners stumbled out of fetid prison cells as Syrians celebrated in the streets. Scattered abroad, members of the extended family mobilized a fresh search, including approaching SOS Children's Villages again. In a statement, its Syria operation acknowledged it had received 139 children 'without proper documentation" between 2014 and 2018, when it demanded the authorities stop placing such cases in its care. Most of those children were returned to authorities under the former regime, SOS Children's Villages said, citing an audit into past records. The Journal couldn't determine what happened to them later. 'We regret the untenable situation we found ourselves in when receiving the children and unequivocally disapprove of such practices," it said. The group said it had taken steps to ensure it didn't happen again. The organization has since filed a claim with Damascus's public prosecutor to open an official investigation into the Yaseen children's disappearance. It said there was no record they had ever been placed in SOS Children's Villages' care. The family expanded their search to other orphanages. Baraa al-Ayoubi, director of the al-Rahma orphanage in Damascus, said Syrian security agents had placed 100 children of detainees in her care over the course of the war, but none of them belonged to Rania. The orphanage was forbidden to disclose details about the children, even to their relatives, when Assad was in power, she said. Eventually, all the children were handed back to their parents, she said. Records in the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor, which has authority over orphanages, confirmed the practice was official. Tucked away in bulging files were secret communiqués from Syria's intelligence services, seen by a Journal reporter, instructing the ministry to transfer detainees' children to orphanages. An investigation launched by the ministry found a document indicating that SOS Children's Villages had returned the Yaseen children to the former regime. But the family wasn't convinced the document, which wasn't on official letterhead, was real. SOS Children's Villages declined to confirm whether it was authentic. A search of the ministry's archives identified about 300 children who were transferred to four orphanages in Damascus, said spokesman Saad al-Jaberi. But many documents have likely been lost, Jaberi said, and the answers that relatives of the 3,700 missing children are seeking may lie elsewhere. 'There are many mass graves," he said. As the search foundered, the children's aunt, Naila, traveled to Damascus from Saudi Arabia, returning to her home country for the first time since before the uprising. Opening the door to her sister's apartment, it was as though time had stopped on the day the family was taken 12 years earlier. Dust-covered school books were stacked neatly on the dining-room table. The refrigerator's contents had rotted beyond recognition. In a notebook belonging to the second-eldest child, there were declarations of love for Syria. 'We'll stay in Syria until you leave, Bashar," wrote Najah Yaseen, who was 11 at the time the family was detained. A cigarette butt on a tray was the only apparent trace left by the security men. Another document, collected by civil-society groups from Syria's air force intelligence, indicated that Rania had been transferred to another branch of the security apparatus in 2014. There was no reference to the children, suggesting they might have been separated by then. The family could only assume she had been killed, but they wouldn't give up on the children. Family members studied photographs on orphanage websites and official channels of the former Syrian government. A girl in a promotional video for SOS Children's Villages strongly resembled one of the Yaseen girls, Dima, who would now be 25. SOS Children's Villages insisted she was someone else. Family members weren't sure they would recognize the children today, so a family friend used artificial intelligence to visualize what they might look like now. After seeing the boy who resembled Ahmed on the website of Lahn al-Hayat, another orphanage, the family tracked him down. His name was Omar Abdurrahman—not Ahmed Yaseen—but other children who grew up in the orphanage said their identities had been changed. Orphanage administrators declined to comment. He couldn't remember anything about his life before the orphanage. But maybe the trauma of being detained at the age of 5 had erased his memories—and the likeness was undeniable. While family members waited for a DNA test to settle any doubt, Omar began referring to the missing boy's aunts as his own. When he saw a photograph of Ahmed, he recognized himself. 'That's me when I was young," he said. Weeks went by before a laboratory finally processed the test. The result came back negative. The boy remained at the orphanage. For the Abbasi family, the search continues. Write to Isabel Coles at
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Musk-Trump breakup exposes cracks in Wall Street's meme casino
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Shares of Trump's media company spat — ignited by the deficit-expanding tax bill threatening Tesla's electric-vehicle subsidies — cooled on Friday and asset valuations steadied. But by then, investors had gotten the message loud and clear. 'You can go from being an incredible beneficiary one moment and then being bludgeoned the next,' said Peter Atwater, founder of Financial Insyghts. 'Anytime you are investing in something that is as crowded as these Elon Musk-related vehicles, you are going to be either the beneficiary or the victim of his standing.'The breakup drama was backdrop to a comparatively sleepy week in regular markets. The S&P 500 ended the week 1.5% higher, while the extended FANG index — which doesn't include Tesla — hit a record. The dollar touched its lowest level in about two years. Ten-year Treasury yields jumped more than 10 basis points this week, as Friday's jobs data eased concerns about an imminent economic for the casino crowd on Thursday, things got ugly. These investors aren't just trading stocks or crypto, they're paying for proximity to dominant personalities. Tesla is a financial avatar for Musk's ambitions. Trump's political resurgence reverberates across his media company, his fast-expanding crypto empire and MAGA-theme products across the broader industry. Each post, endorsement and headline is a chance to pull capital into the retail investment hasn't just drawn in risk junkies — it's built an entire product architecture, from speculative bets to more conventional funds tied to the fortunes of billionaire Musk. Vehicles like Baron Partners Fund and the Ark Innovation ETF got caught up in the selloff before markets rebounded on sharp rout — its worst week since 2023 — was fueled by projections that the company faces a $1 billion hit to full-year profit, if it loses a tax credit from Trump's bill. Meanwhile, the president's businesses pushed deeper into the financial ecosystem. His media company was one step closer to launching the Truth Social Bitcoin ETF, the latest in a string of crypto-linked assets and 'MAGA'-themed investment those with the nerve to dive into the newfangled, the gains have been eye-popping at times. A closed-end fund with Space-X exposure, Destiny Tech100 Inc., surged about 500% in just a month after the Nov. 5 election. Dogecoin went from 15 cents to above 43 cents in November, when Ark surged by 26% in less than two spirits have run high since the pandemic but soared anew after Trump buddied up with Musk on the campaign trail and won the White House, backed by the $250 million the Tesla founder spent on the meme ethos was cemented when Musk's program to cut government spending took its name from a crypto token born as a canine-themed joke.'I put him in the separate category of the Zeus of personality cults, beyond anything that has ever happened,' said Jay Hatfield, CEO of Infrastructure Capital Management. 'We've never had anybody running a major company like him.'The result has been a speculative spasm that, until this week, was often insulated from old-school markets convulsed by Trump's on-again-off-again tariff threats. An element of the craze that infuriates Wall Street's old guard — the near-impossibility of forming a valuation case around things like crypto tokens and public vehicles for private holdings — proved a virtue at a time of rampant economic uncertainty.'Retail traders — the bro trade component of retail — they've never really cared much about fundamentals,' said Dave Mazza, Chief Executive Officer at Roundhill Investments who in February launched a Tesla-focused product. 'These folks really believe in the narrative on stocks like Tesla and Palantir Technologies Inc. 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