Syria expert Charles Lister of the Washington-based Middle East Institute said, “It shouldn’t surprise us that the Assad regime is willing to take advantage of a catastrophic natural disaster to serve its own interests,” citing Syrian government appeals to the United Nations and aid deliveries from the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Iraq and Italy. But he warned against lifting sanctions on the government to further its normalization.
"The main area of exploitation is its demand for sanctions relief," Lister told the Italian Institute of International Political Studies. "There is no correlation between the sanctions imposed on the regime by the United States, the European Union, Canada or the United Kingdom and the delivery of humanitarian aid. In 2022, the billions of dollars of aid that flowed into regime areas, through Damascus, 91% of that was funded by the four sanctioning entities."
Lister added that “we do probably appear to be on an accelerated path toward the normalization of the regime, but a lot of it will depend on how the regime responds: whether it is stubborn or more pragmatic as it deals with requests for further aid and how it deals with the governments that continue to press against it.”