Syria Sanctions Bill Quadruples Conditions for Relief, Eliminates Quick Waiver Renewals

The newly introduced Syria Sanctions Accountability Act of 2025 is less about new sanctions and more about locking down the existing ones, making it significantly harder for the Syrian government to ever get out from under them. This bill essentially tells the Executive Branch: tighten up the rules, report back often, and forget about short-term flexibility.

The Fine Print on Financial Oversight

If you deal with international finance, pay attention to Section 2. It requires the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN)—the agency that fights money laundering—to review a specific exception they granted to the Commercial Bank of Syria back in May 2025. FinCEN has about a year (360 days) to tell Congress whether that special permission actually helped U.S. foreign policy goals. Think of it as a mandatory performance review for a regulatory loophole. If FinCEN decides the exception isn't pulling its weight, they have to recommend whether to keep it or change their original findings about the bank. This is a big deal because it increases Congressional oversight on specific regulatory decisions that often fly under the radar.

Section 3 focuses on the global financial stage, instructing the Treasury Secretary to tell U.S. directors at the IMF and the World Bank to push Syria to clean up its act. This means advocating for Syria to start reporting accurate economic data and accepting technical assistance to fight money laundering, terrorism financing, and corruption. This part of the bill is temporary, though; the requirement to push these actions expires after two years. For the international development community, this signals a short-term, focused push on financial compliance, but it’s a policy that Congress will have to actively renew if they want it to stick around.

Raising the Bar for Sanctions Relief

The most impactful change comes in Section 5, which deals with the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019. The bill replaces the existing four conditions the Syrian government needed to meet to get sanctions lifted with a whopping nine, much stricter requirements. This isn't just adding a few items; it’s fundamentally shifting the goalposts.

For example, the new rules demand that the Syrian government must stop using its airspace to target civilians, allow regular access for international aid and medical care into government-controlled areas, release all political prisoners, and allow international human rights groups to investigate its prison systems. Crucially, it also requires them to take verifiable steps to fight the illegal production and international spread of the drug Captagon.

Less Flexibility, More Rigidity

This bill also removes flexibility from the sanctions process. It eliminates the ability to renew certain sanctions waivers for short 180-day periods. If you were a foreign person or entity operating under one of those short-term waivers, that safety net is gone. The bill also removes the requirement for the President to review active waivers every 180 days. While this might seem like less bureaucracy, it means that once a waiver is granted, it stays in place without mandated, frequent executive review, potentially reducing oversight on active exemptions.

Ultimately, this Act sets an expiration date of December 31, 2029, but provides a way out sooner: if the Syrian government meets all nine of those tough conditions for two full years, the law ends 30 days later. Given the high bar of compliance—especially the requirements to release all political prisoners and stop targeting civilians—this bill is designed to keep the pressure on and make sanctions relief an incredibly heavy lift.