WASHINGTON (AP) – The House on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved bipartisan bills to crack down on supporters of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government and renew a decades-old Iran sanctions law.
Swift passage underscored broad support on Capitol Hill for punishing financial backers of the Syrian government and maintaining economic pressure on Tehran. Both bills had the firm backing of Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, the panel’s top Democrat.
The Senate must now act on the legislation before the bills can be sent to the president.
Lawmakers have accused the Assad government of war crimes as the number of people killed during the violence in Syria continues to mount. The war, now in its sixth year, has killed as many as half a million people, contributed to Europe’s worst refugee crisis since World War II and given the Islamic State group room to grow into a global terror threat.
“What we have now is a grim lesson in human suffering,” Royce said. “We can see the ethnic cleansing going on. Even the United Nations calls this ‘crimes of historic proportions.’ Enough’s enough.”