UK imposes sanctions on six Syrian regime figures including foreign minister

Close allies of President Bashar Al Assad will be subject to travel bans and frozen assets

Syrian soldiers are seen cheering President Bashar Al Assad during his visit to Al Habit on the southern edges of the Idlib province, in a picture released on October 22, 2019. AFP / Syrian Presidency Facebook page

A Turkish gendarme retrieves the body of Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi from a beach in Turkey. Reuters

The guided-missile destroyer 'USS Porter' conducts strikes while in the Mediterranean Sea, on April 7, 2017. AFP / US NAVY

A handout picture released by the official Syrian Arab News Agency on October 31, 2013, shows the remains of a mortar after an alleged mortar attack by rebel fighters on the Damascus mixed Christian-Druze suburb of Jaramana. AFP / Sana

Displaced Syrians from the south of Idlib province sit out in the open in the countryside west of the town of Dana in the north-west Syrian region on December 23, 2019. AFP

This picture shows a general view of an overcrowded displacement camp near the village of Qah near the Turkish border in Syria's north-west Idlib province, on October 28, 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic crisis. AFP

A picture taken on March 23, 2019, shows the last ISIS bastion in the eastern Syrian village of Baghuz after the defeat of the group. The Kurdish-led forces pronounced the end of ISIS regime on March 23, 2019, after flushing out the diehard militants from their very last bastion in eastern Syria. AFP

Anti-government activists gesture as they gather on the streets of Daraa, 100 kilometres south of the capital Damascus, on March 23, 2011. AFP

Syria's President Bashar Al Assad heading a cabinet meeting in the presidential palace in Damascus in 2013. Sana / AFP

A picture taken on October 3, 2015 shows a Russian army pilot leaving the cockpit of a Russian Sukhoi Su-25 ground attack aircraft at the Hmeimim airbase in the Syrian province of Latakia. AFP

Members of the Free Syrian Army raise their weapons during a patrol in Idlib in north-west Syria on February 18, 2012. AFP

Syrian President Bashar Al Assad is shown shaking hands with government troops in Eastern Ghouta, in the leader's first trip to the former rebel enclave outside Damascus in years, in this handout picture released by the Syrian Presidency on March 18, 2018. Syrian Presidency Facebook page / AFP

Militant fighters wave flags as they take part in a military parade along the streets of Syria's northern Raqqa province, on June 30, 2014. Reuters

Britain imposed sanctions on six senior Syrian regime figures on Monday, including the foreign minister, 10 years after the devastating conflict in Syria began.

Targets included Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad, media adviser Luna Shibl and two senior military figures, Malik Aliaa and Zaid Salah, all close allies of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad.

“The Assad regime has subjected the Syrian people to a decade of brutality for the temerity of demanding peaceful reform,” said British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab.

“Today, we are holding six more individuals from the regime to account for their wholesale assault on the very citizens they should be protecting.”

Britain’s Foreign Ministry said the “individuals are all part of or support the regime, and are responsible for repressing the Syrian people or benefiting from their misery”.

The six will be subject to frozen assets and travel bans “to ensure they do not benefit from the UK in any way”.

Prominent businessman Muhammad Bara’ Al Qatirji and financier Yassar Ibrahim were among those sanctioned.

Mr Mekdad, who was promoted from his deputy foreign minister role in November, "shares responsibility for the Syrian regime's violent repression against the civilian population", the UK government said.

The European Union imposed sanctions on him two months ago for similar reasons.

Maj Gen Aliaa, as a leader of the Republican Guard and its commander as of January 2021, was “responsible for the violent repression of the civilian population by troops under his command, particularly during the increased violence of the offensives on north-west Syria of 2019-20”, the UK government said.

Maj Gen Salah was guilty of similar repression, "particularly during the increased violence of the Idlib/Hama offensive which began in April 2019”.

The penalties are the first targeting Syrian leaders under the UK’s autonomous sanctions regime, which was implemented at the start of this year.

It comes after British police opened a preliminary investigation into Mr Assad's wife Asma for alleged involvement in war crimes.