Assad regime can take action for peaceful resolution or face crippling sanctions: Mike Pompeo
Washington:
The United States on Monday imposed new sanctions against the Syrian oil industry, lawmakers and intelligence agents, vowing not to ease the pressure on President Bashar al-Assad despite his gains on the ground.
“The Assad regime has a choice: to take irreversible steps towards a peaceful resolution of this conflict which has lasted for almost ten years or to face new crippling sanctions,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement. .
The Treasury Department and State Department have banned transactions with 19 people or entities and have frozen any U.S. assets they may hold – its fifth round of sanctions since tough new U.S. law came into effect on Syria.
The sanctioned entities include two partners of the Syrian Ministry of Petroleum – Arfada Petroleum Private Joint Stock Co and Sallizar Shipping, who work on an oil refinery in war-torn Raqa province and a terminal in the coastal town of Tartous.
The United States has also imposed sanctions on General Ghassan Jaoudat Ismail, chief of intelligence of the Syrian Air Force, and on Brigadier General Nasr Al-Ali, who heads the Directorate of Political Security, an agency of the Syrian Arab Republic. espionage tasked with curbing dissent against Assad.
The Caesar law, which came into effect in June, limits all US reconstruction aid and keeps the pressure on Assad to account, even though he has regained control of most of Syria after more than nine years bloodshed.
The State Department said it was imposing the latest sanctions in memory of the more than 70 civilians killed in an October 2015 bombing of a market in Douma, a town near Damascus then under rebel control that was struck three years later by a chemical attack, according to a UN probe.
Six days after the US election in which Democrat Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump, Pompeo has announced that the leading US man on Syria, James Jeffrey, 74, will retire this month.
A former US ambassador to Baghdad and Ankara, the Turkish-speaking diplomat has been a key intermediary with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who last year assaulted Syrian Kurds allied with the United States following a Trump-ordered withdrawal.
Nathan Sales, the State Department’s top counterterrorism official, will take over both as the US representative on Syria and sent to the coalition to defeat the Islamic State group, Pompeo said .
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
