| The Biden administration imposed new sanctions on a group of Syrian prisons and officials on Wednesday as part of its effort to pressure the government of President Bashar al-Assad to end human rights abuses. The sanctions were the first to be directed at Syria by the Biden administration. The Treasury Department levied sanctions on eight Syrian prisons and five Assad government officials who work in the institutions that run those facilities. Treasury also sanctioned Syrian opposition militia Ahrar al-Sharqiya and two of its leaders for alleged abductions, torture and killings, including that of a top Kurdish politician that the UN claims was a possible war crime.
“Today’s designations promote accountability for abuses committed against the Syrian people and deny rogue actors access to the international financial system,” Andrea M. Gacki, the director of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, said in a statement. The sanctions were announced in coordination with the State Department, which noted that some of the prisons appeared in photographs provided by a Syrian defector who had worked as an official photographer for the Syrian military and exposed the government’s treatment of detainees. The sanctions prohibit travel to the U.S. and block any assets the officials and entities might have within U.S. jurisdiction. Given the likely limited financial exposure the officials and prisons have to the sanctions, analysts say the action is intended more as public censure of the regime and its supporters.
Meanwhile, in Germany, a Syrian military doctor accused of torturing opponents of President Bashar al-Assad in military facilities in Syria was indicted on Wednesday on charges of crimes against humanity by the German Federal Prosecutor’s Office. Mousa killed at least one detainee with a lethal injection and tortured at least another 18, the Federal Prosecutor’s Office said when announcing the charges on Wednesday. The move to indict the doctor, Alaa Mousa, was part of an effort by German authorities to hold accountable the Syrian government officials who sneaked into Germany along with more than a million refugees in 2015 and 2016. Dr. Mousa has been in German custody since he was arrested last year. He worked as an assistant doctor in a military hospital in Homs, from April 2011 until the end of 2012. In the charges laid out by prosecutors, Dr. Mousa was accused of a litany of crimes against detainees. A date for the trial has not been set. New York Times, CNN, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Washington Post, Al Jazeera |