The Caesar Act shuffles the cards of the Syrian reconstruction game

Nine years of conflict have devastated Syria, disfiguring its social and urban fabric in a catastrophic way. While the battle on the ground seems to have reached its final stages, the apparently economic, but fundamentally political, game about the future of the country and its reconstruction is at its most heated. This is mainly due to the interests of the numerous actors involved, and especially after the shuffling of cards represented by the US Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, which came into force on 17 June and is better known simply as the “Caesar Act”.

The act, in addition to being a first step towards the recognition of the human rights violations committed by the regime of Bashar al-Assad, provides for the imposition of new sanctions on the Syrian President’s regime and on any individual or organization that supports or facilitates the acquisition by him of goods, services or technologies useful to his military activities, to the aeronautical sector, to the Syrian hydrocarbon industry and to the construction sector, also through engineering services, hindering, in fact, the process of reconstruction of the country. These are secondary sanctions, which therefore have extra-territorial effectiveness: that is, they are applicable to any entity or individual, regardless of nationality, who has a certain type of commercial activity or support in Damascus, even indirectly. These sanctions consist of denying access both to the financial system and to the US market, which have a global scope.