By DAN BILEFSKY and ANTHONY SHADID
Published: November 30, 2011
The article starts very briefly:
Turkey took steps on Wednesday to freeze the Syrian government’s financial assets, impose a travel ban on senior Syrian officials and cut off transactions with the country’s central bank, sharply escalating international pressure on Damascus in response to its continuing violence against civilians.
Turkish officials said that the latest measures were enacted to follow the Arab League that imposed broad trade sanctions and are part of a developing international effort to strangle Syria's economy and diminish the power of Syrian government.
The Arab League published a list of 17 senior Syrian officials who could face a ban on travel to other Arab countries. The officials include the ministers of defense and interior.
European, American Turkish officials all said:
they believed Syria’s economic troubles could prove the undoing of Mr. Assad, who to date has managed to maintain the allegiance of Syria’s business elite.The economic sanctions would be a big damage to Syria.
The European Union and the United States were the first to impose penalties, and European sanctions, in particular, harmed Syria’s oil industry, which once contributed as much as a third of the government’s revenue. Though Europe is Syria’s biggest overall trading partner, Turkey and Arab states make up four of its next five biggest, and the Syrian leadership, along with those tied to it, has large investments in the Persian Gulf.There's another thing that Turkey decided:
Turkey also decided, given that Mr. Assad continues to ignore the Arab League’s calls for peace and political reform, to divert all of its Middle Eastern trade away from routes that traverse Syria, siphoning off yet another source of income for an increasingly isolated government.
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