Ahmad al-Sharaa was asked on Sunday how Syria got out from under the American sanctions that had sealed it off for more than a decade. He named two people.
"His Excellency President Erdoğan and Saudi Arabia mediated last year with US President Donald Trump to lift the sanctions on Syria," the Syrian president told Al Jazeera's Al-Muqabala program, in remarks carried by Anadolu Ajansı.
Heads of state thank each other for a living, and the compliment would be worth little on its own. This one happens to match the record.
Riyadh, May 2025
Trump announced the decision at a US-Saudi investment forum in Riyadh on 13 May 2025, on the first stop of a Gulf tour, and he made it sound like a favor being granted. "The sanctions were brutal and crippling, and served ... an important function, nevertheless, at the time," he said, "but now it's their time to shine." He wished Syria good luck and told it to show him something very special.
In announcing it he cited requests from two men: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
The next day, at the crown prince's request, Trump met al-Sharaa in Riyadh. It was the first meeting between an American and a Syrian president in 25 years. Mohammed bin Salman sat in. Erdoğan joined by telephone.
The White House account of it, given afterward by press secretary Karoline Leavitt, has Erdoğan praising Trump for lifting the sanctions and pledging to work alongside Saudi Arabia on Syria, and Trump thanking both men for their friendship.
It was not a gift with nothing attached. In the same meeting Trump pressed al-Sharaa to normalize relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords and to move against terrorist threats, conditions Damascus has been working around ever since.
What followed, on paper
The legal dismantling came in stages, and the dates are the answer to how much the Riyadh meeting was worth.
The Treasury issued General License 25 and a Caesar Act waiver in May 2025. Trump signed an executive order lifting most Syria sanctions on 30 June 2025. Congress repealed the Caesar Act outright in December. On 8 July this year he notified Congress that he intends to take Syria off the list of state sponsors of terrorism, a designation the country has carried since 1979, which now runs through a 45-day review.
That last move followed talks in Ankara, which is the second Turkish fingerprint on the American file inside a year.
What Ankara holds now
The policy has bought Türkiye standing inside the Syrian recovery, and some of it is contractual. The $7 billion energy agreement Syria signed in May 2025 went to a consortium of Qatari, Turkish and American firms, which gives Ankara a direct stake in whether the lights in Damascus stay on. Turkish warships tied up at Latakia this month for the first time since the war began. Two days before the UN secretary-general landed in Damascus last weekend, the two governments signed an agreement putting Yunus Emre Institute branches back across Syria, teaching Turkish, in a country where the institute had closed its Damascus and Aleppo centers when the fighting started in 2011.
What the credit is worth
Less than the applause suggests, on the evidence so far.
Sanctions relief has not reached most Syrians. Roughly nine in ten of them live below the poverty line. State electricity now comes in stretches of five or six hours before it cuts, which counts as improvement and which residents still call expensive and unreliable. The World Bank has put the reconstruction bill at $216 billion.
Al-Sharaa is also not spending his credit in one direction. In the same interview he said Syria is working with several countries toward a security agreement with Israel, which he argued would open the way to a comprehensive peace without giving up Syria's claim to the occupied Golan Heights. He said talks with Moscow over its military presence have not concluded. He ruled out any military intervention in Lebanon while offering Beirut what he called several cards. And he repeated that lifting economic sanctions does limited good while Syria stays on the terrorism list, the one item still pending in Washington.
Damascus is playing several hands at once, and crediting Erdoğan on Qatari television while negotiating security terms with Israel and hosting unresolved Russian bases is one of them. Ankara has spent a year and a half making sure it stays among the hands worth playing.