President Donald Trump has said he is ordering the lifting of U.S. sanctions on Syria to start the process of normalizing relations between Washington and Damascus in hopes of bolstering the war-torn country’s new government, more than a decade after the Obama administration severed diplomatic ties at the outset of the civil war that ended with the ousting of dictator Bashar al-Assad last year.
Speaking in Riyadh, where he addressed a Saudi-American investment forum on the first day of his four-day, three-country swing through the Middle East, Trump said the new Syrian government “will hopefully succeed in stabilizing the country and keeping peace” after the country’s people had seen “their share of travesty and war” over “many years.”
