Syria Faces Further Sanctions Due to Illicit Dealings with Iraq

July 28th, 2005 at 19:24 Björn Hallberg

Hypocrisy anyone?

The State Department said Wednesday Syria could face additional U.S. penalties if refuses to transfer to Iraq $262 million in funds the United States says it obtained in violation of U.N. Security Council sanctions against Iraq. Elizabeth Dibble, a deputy assistant secretary of state, told a hearing of two House subcommittees that the United States has repeatedly pressed Syria to transfer these assets to the Development Fund for Iraq, or DFI.

The Syrian government has said repeatedly that it is committed to transfer these funds and did so again this month during a meeting between senior Iraqi and Syrian leaders, Dibble said.

She added that despite Syrian efforts to improve anti-money laundering and terrorist finance controls, U.S. sanctions provided for under the USA Patriot Act “could be triggered if Syria does not follow through with the transfer of this remaining amount to the DFI.”

A couple of things to note. First, the “Development Fund for Iraq” is notoriously mismanaged and unlike what United Nations Security Council resolution 1483 would have us believe, the US is still pretty much running the show via its puppet government, the Coalition Provisional Authority. On several occasions have the US failed to provide data or impeded investigations into the fund. Most of the time, the project has been characterized by inadequate financial controls and failure to make expenditures an open and transparent issue. And when US congressman Henry Waxman took a closer look, his team found that oil had been exported unmetered.

Second of all, guess who did the most sanctions busting and indeed let other nations slip? Yeah, that is right, the USA. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations concluded that:

“The United States (government) was not only aware of Iraqi oil sales which violated UN sanctions and provided the bulk of the illicit money Saddam Hussein obtained from circumventing UN sanctions. On occasion, the United States actually facilitated the illicit oil sales.”

Entry 180 filed under: Middle East, North America. This entry was posted 3 years, 4 months ago. RSS feed for comments on this post.