The United States delisted Syria as a state sponsor of terrorism this week, ending a designation that had stood since 1979 — 47 years — and that Damascus says was the last major formal obstacle to foreign investment in the country. [1] Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he had authorized the formal rescission following the conclusion of a mandatory 45-day congressional notification period, and simultaneously delisted Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham, the group formerly designated a Specially Designated Global Terrorist entity, from that separate list. [2]
Washington first placed Syria on the state sponsor list under Hafez al-Assad, accusing his government of backing militant groups across the region. The designation survived the rule of his son, Bashar al-Assad, and outlasted the descent of Syria's decade-long civil war — only to be lifted eight months after Bashar al-Assad was ousted in December 2024 by a rebel coalition led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, who now serves as Syria's president. [1] Cuba, Iran and North Korea remain on the State Department's list. [1]
Rubio's own statement, posted in full on X, laid out the administration's case for the reversal in explicitly transactional terms. The rescission, he wrote, "represents another historic step by U.S. President Donald Trump to give the Syrian people a path to prosperity," taken "in recognition of the positive actions taken and further commitments by the Syrian government under President Ahmed al-Sharaa to fully distance Syria from acts of international terrorism." [2] He cited Syria's formal accession to the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS in November and operations disrupting the networks of ISIS, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and Iran-aligned groups as evidence of that shift. [2]
Mainstream coverage of the move has largely followed Rubio's own framing: a bureaucratic-sounding designation is lifted, and the practical consequence is that Syria's economy, cut off from large-scale foreign capital for decades, gets a green light. Democracy Now's account of the story frames it plainly as removing "the last major obstacle to international investment" — a headline about capital flows, not about who now runs the country receiving them. [1]
That framing understates the sharper part of the story. Al-Sharaa did not simply take power in a country that happened to be sanctioned — he arrived at the presidency by leading Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham, the very group Washington designated a global terrorist organization and has now also delisted, in the same week, alongside Syria itself. [2] A former rebel commander whose organization the United States once formally branded as terrorist is now the direct political beneficiary of a decision that opens his government to the international financial system it was locked out of for nearly half a century. Rubio's statement treats that continuity as evidence of transformation — proof that al-Sharaa has earned reintegration through a year of counterterrorism cooperation. Skeptics inside and outside Syria are more likely to see it as a startlingly fast rehabilitation of a man Washington was hunting a few years ago, now dressed in the language of investment policy.
Whether the delisting produces the capital influx Damascus is counting on will depend on factors well beyond a State Department notice — sanctions relief has a way of arriving on paper faster than it arrives in bank transfers. But the symbolism of the moment is not in dispute: a 47-year-old designation, survived by two Assads and a civil war, ended within a year of the man who fought his way to power inheriting it.
-- YOSEF STERN, Jerusalem