A year after Washington began dismantling the sanctions that had sealed Syria off from the world economy, Damascus spent this week acting like a country open for business. It hosted the first Syrian-US Business Forum, sent its foreign minister to Riyadh, and signed an air-transport agreement with Germany, three moves in seven days that would have been unthinkable while Bashar al-Assad ruled. The reporting on all of it traces to Syrian state media through Anadolu Ajansı, so the framing is Damascus's own, but the direction is not in doubt.
The forum, held in Damascus and organized with the Syrian-American Business Council, centered on energy and reconstruction. Syrian officials said US measures had lifted the main obstacles to trade and investment, and American speakers, including a deputy assistant secretary of state, said US companies had begun weighing projects while Washington worked to restore Syria's access to the international banking system. The legal groundwork was laid over the past year, and on this point the record is Washington's, not Damascus's. The United States issued General License 25 and a Caesar Act waiver in May 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order lifting most Syria sanctions on 30 June 2025, and Congress repealed the Caesar Act outright in December. On 8 July, Trump went further, notifying Congress that he intends to remove Syria from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, a designation the country has carried since 1979, a change that runs through a 45-day review before it takes effect. No dollar figures were attached to the forum's talk of deals.
The diplomacy ran in parallel. Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani arrived in Riyadh on Wednesday and met his Saudi counterpart, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, to review a relationship that has become one of the new government's most important, though the two sides reported no concrete agreements. In Damascus, Syria and Germany signed an air-transport agreement and launched a joint committee covering reconstruction, investment, and the voluntary return of Syrian refugees from Germany, building on the reopening of the German embassy in March 2025 and al-Sharaa's visit to Berlin this spring.
The reopening has a harder edge at home. Al Jazeera, reporting from Damascus, found state electricity had improved to five or six hours at a stretch before a cut, an advance that residents still call expensive and unreliable, with roughly nine in ten Syrians below the poverty line. The government has taken back the oil-producing northeast and lifted output, and struck import deals for gas with Azerbaijan, Jordan and Egypt. Türkiye sits inside that recovery too: the $7 billion energy agreement Syria signed in May 2025 was struck with Qatari, Turkish and American firms, one of the concrete stakes Ankara now holds in whether the lights in Damascus stay on.