The United States will impose sanctions on Wednesday aimed at cutting off revenue for Syrian president Bashar Assad's government in a bid to push it back into United Nations-led negotiations and broker an end to the country's nearly decade-long war.
The war-torn nation has seen an intensifying economic crisis and on Wednesday the Caesar Act takes effect, a US law that targets companies that deal with Damascus.
US Ambassador to the UN Kelly Craft told the Security Council on Tuesday that Washington would implement the measures to "prevent the Assad regime from securing a military victory."
"Our aim is to deprive the Assad regime of the revenue and the support it has used to commit the large-scale atrocities and human rights violations that prevent a political resolution and severely diminish the prospects for peace," Craft said.
She urged Assad to embrace Security Council Resolution 2254 of 2015 -- which called for a ceasefire, elections and political transition in Syria -- and talks under UN envoy Geir Pedersen.
"The Assad regime has a clear choice to make: pursue the political path established in Resolution 2254, or leave the United States with no other choice but to continue withholding reconstruction funding and impose sanctions against the regime and its financial backers," she said.
Craft said the sanctions aim to deter "bad actors who continue to aid and finance the Assad regime's atrocities against the Syrian people while simply enriching themselves."
The Caesar Act, passed by the US Congress last year with bipartisan support, seeks to prevent Assad's normalization without accountability for human rights abuses.
The law penalizes in the United States any company that deals with Assad and blocks reconstruction assistance from Washington.
The law is named after a former Syrian military photographer who fled at great personal risk in 2014 with 55,000 images of brutality in Assad's jails since he launched his crackdown on protests three years earlier.
With Syrian and Russian forces mounting a major offensive in Idlib, a UN-backed constitutional review aimed at reaching a peaceful solution has made little progress.
Pedersen told the Security Council that he was willing to resume constitutional talks in Geneva in late August. The constitutional committee negotiations struggled to make headway last year.
A crackdown by Assad on pro-democracy protesters in 2011 led to war, with Moscow backing Assad and Washington supporting the opposition. Millions of people have fled Syria and millions are internally displaced.
