Brussels has held a donor conference pledging €5.8 billion to Syria reconstruction – but only €720.5 million of this, which is across 2025 and 2026, was “to support the population inside Syria, as well as Syrian refugees and vulnerable host communities across Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq”.
An end in US aid has meant the total amount, which also included €1 billion for Turkey, represented a 30 per cent decline from last year’s €7.5 billion.
Natasha Franceschi, US deputy assistant secretary of state, said at the conference, “‘we also now expect that other nations are going to help shoulder the financial burden”.
In addition, while the EU has also begun to reduce its sanctions on Syria, “these measures did not live up so far to our expectations”, Syria’s foreign minister Asaad al-Shibani stated.
The EU partially lifted its sanctions on the country on February 24, a move it said would be reversed if Syria’s new leaders did not include ethnic and religious minorities or respect the rule of law.
The eased sanctions were concentrated on Syria’s energy, transport and banking sectors.
“We want further measures in order to help us secure our recovery. These sanctions were imposed on the old regime, therefore we are punished for something we have not done,” al-Shibani said.
German MEP Hannah Neumann echoed criticism that the EU had been slow to respond to the fall of former dictator Bashar al-Assad in December last year.
She told a side event organised by Amnesty International: “If there are no financial transfers … how are [Syrians] supposed to buy things, to sell things?”
The donor conference represented “a stagnant approach” from the EU, which saw “no breakthroughs” and “still no real push toward recovery or reconstruction efforts,” said M’arouf Yousef, a field co-ordinator in Syria with Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders).
Al-Shibani attended the conference, along with the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs Kaja Kallas and Turkey’s deputy foreign minister Nuh Yilmaz.
Turkey, which has hosted approximately three million Syrian refugees (of 6.7 million worldwide), said before the conference in a foreign ministry statement: “The sanctions must be lifted unconditionally and for an indeterminate period.”
The meeting was the EU’s ninth donor conference for Syria but the first after the fall of al-Assad. Previous conferences had focused on the needs of Syrian refugees who had fled to neighbouring countries, particularly Turkey.
The €5.8 billion included €4.2 billion in grants, with the remainder in loans.
The Brussels conference “fails to close [the] humanitarian gap”, said the International Rescue Committee.
Its country director Tanya Evans argued the €5.8 billion “falls dangerously short of the amount needed to address the immense humanitarian needs” in Syria”.
“Humanitarian agencies like the IRC are being challenged to do more with less,” she added.
Syria has seen an increase in fighting between the new government and those loyal to the former al-Assad regime, who are concentrated in the West of the country among the Alawite community from which he hailed.
Iran has possibly played a role in fomenting the violence, which has seen hundreds of civilians killed in March, according to Steven Cook, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Syria had become largely a European problem, added Cook, “even before he was inaugurated, US President Donald Trump declared that Syria was not an American fight”.
