BEIRUT — Turkey announced wide-ranging sanctions against Syria on Wednesday in response to a continuing military crackdown on protests by the Syrian government.
Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davtoglu unveiled measures including a freeze on Syrian assets within Turkey and a ban on transactions with the Syrian central bank, capping an eight-day stretch when Turkish rhetoric against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has become increasingly critical.
The sanctions by Turkey, one of Syria’s top trading partners, come as both the Arab League and the European Union enact their own punitive measures — a triple blow that highlights the growing isolation of the government in Damascus and could significantly impact Syria’s economy.
Syria’s trade and business sectors already are suffering from earlier sanctions andmonths of unrest, with the once-lucrative tourism industry essentially ruined and trade with the European Union — to whom Syrian once sold 90 percent of its crude oil products — down significantly.
On Thursday, the E.U. is set to impose thelatest in a number of rounds of sanctions, directly impacting Syria’s oil industry and telecommunications sector and targeting a number of individuals in addition to the regime officials already affected.
The 22-nation Arab League announced its own sanctions last weekend. Although those restrictions are likely to be enforced patchily by Arab countries, they began to bite Wednesday, Reuters reported, when the United Arab Emirates said they would suspend commercial flights to Syria beginning next week.
Although Turkish officials have made it clear in the past that the country has no interest in a military solution to the Syrian problem, their rhetoric has become more belligerent. In a television interview broadcast Tuesday, foreign minister Ahmet Davotglu said, “If oppression continued, Turkey remains ready for all possible scenarios.”
The country has, over the past seven years, become a huge trading partner of Syria, and the sudden loss of Turkish business will be a heavy blow to the business sector, particularly in the larger cities and in the northern part of Syria, along the Turkish border.
Since a free trade agreement was signed between the two countries in 2004 as part of an economic liberalization program led by Assad, trade volume has increased from about $750 million annually to $2.2 billion last year, according to the Turkish ministry of foreign affairs.
A key bastion of support for Assad is the merchant class, which benefited from his economic reforms and has enjoyed increased quality of life in Damascus and in Aleppo, insulated from high levels of rural poverty, which have worsened after years of drought.
If the E.U., Arab and Turkish sanctions weigh heavily on the Syrian business community, that support could quickly erode.
However, the new sanctions could be politically difficult to implement within Turkey. A report by the International Crisis Group released this month noted that the country’s economic growth was set to decrease to 2.2 percent next year, a slowdown that would be exacerbated by loss of Syrian business.
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