Donald Trump has announced, and his treasury secretary Scott Bessent has seemingly confirmed, that the United States will now begin the lifting of all sanctions on Syria, less than seven months on from the fall of the regime of Bashar al-Assad, one of the most heavily sanctioned in the world. After 14 years of devastating civil war, the collapse of the cash economy, the cannibalising of much of regime-held Syria into drug trafficking and much of rebel-held Syria into militia warlordism, Syria is desolated.

A third of the country’s buildings are in ruins; but this does not stop people trying to live in them. Whole regions are filled with rubble. Not far from the presidential palace in Damascus, entire neighbourhoods are wrecked. Formerly vast and ancient cities like Aleppo are in pieces, their great buildings and their residential neighbourhoods wracked and ruined.

Much clever, persistent advocacy has been done by Syrian-Americans over the years — first intended to keep the pressure on Assad, which finally told late last year, and now for the relief of sanctions. Why keep sanctions that aimed to hurt a regime that has fallen? Why subject Syrians to more suffering than the unimaginable toll they have already faced?

Trump likes a deal as much as any American president ever has — and he has by turns tried to befriend the Saudi crown prince and prime minister, Mohammed bin Salman, the emir of Qatar, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the president of the UAE, Mohammed bin Zayed — even the Houthi rebels in Yemen, who his administration was until this month bombing. Why not the interim president of Syria Ahmed al-Sharaa? But al-Sharaa is a different case.

Twenty years to the day before he met president Trump in Riyadh, al-Sharaa, fighting under one of his many assumed names, was arrested by US occupation forces in Iraq. He was sent to Camp Bucca, a jihadist prison — a ‘university’ for the men who later formed Jabhat al-Nusra, which al-Sharaa (using the name Abu Muhammed al-Jolani) ran, and the Islamic State (ISIS).

Al-Sharaa had crossed the border from Syria to fight the Americans; after his release, he left Iraq and entered Syria at the head of a small group of men to fight the regime of Bashar al-Assad. In Syria, al-Sharaa founded the first of several al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria. The Nusra Front, as it was called, cut ties with al-Qaeda in 2016. That dissociation has been real and lasting. In Syria, al-Sharaa was his own man; after a series of defeats and rebel evacuations, and squabbles between groups, he found himself running his own statelet in Syria’s northern Idlib province.

His victory in the campaign titled ‘Deterring of Aggression’ in December last year appears to have shocked no one more than al-Sharaa himself. Already devoutly, obsessively religious, his faith must have been strengthened by such a miracle. As for Trump, he does not love Syrians – despite being skilfully lobbied by them and their representatives. But he does appear, for the moment, to like their advocates. Trump is susceptible to the diplomacy of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, and of Mohammed bin Salman, who have been at the forefront of lobbying for Syria’s re-entry into the community of nations. And Trump likes fighters; he likes men who look the part. And none have fought more and look the part better than al-Sharaa — insurgent leader, soldier of god, president of a free country after 50 years of abject tyranny whose worst horrors are beyond description.

How did you find the Syrian president? President Trump was asked as he flew home. ‘Great. Great,’ he said. ‘I think very good. Young, attractive guy, tough guy, you know? Strong past. Very strong past. Fighter. He’s got a real shot at pulling it together.’

Trump’s demands for Syria appear to have been that it make foreign fighters leave the country, throw out Palestinian terrorists, and assume responsibility for ISIS prisons and camps in the north-east. Improbably, the White House wants Syria to sign up to the Abraham Accords with Israel (Israel has destroyed much of Syria’s navy, its air defences, its military infrastructure, occupies the Golan Heights, and has invaded its territory since the fall of Assad — while the new Syrian government is no threat to Israel and has said as much). Trump wants al-Sharaa to fight the Islamic State, which his government is already eagerly doing. There is already close co-operation between the United States and the new government on fighting ISIS. The White House also wishes, although less vocally, that internal civic peace within Syria, including with the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an American proxy and enemy of Turkey’s, be maintained.

Many Syrians believe building a Trump Tower in Damascus at preferential rates would ensure the American president’s appreciation. They are used to dealing with practices like this; and the relief of sanctions could be like removing a boot from the country’s neck. Many key Syria analysts in the first Trump administration and the current White Houses’s orbit will not be happy with this outcome. Men like Joel Rayburn, an immensely experienced soldier and diplomat awaiting senate confirmation to be Assistant Secretary of State (Near Eastern Affairs), believe al-Sharaa is a jihadist, as he has always been. Other conservatives, Trump critics like former national security advisor John Bolton, believe Trump ought to have got more and different concessions from the new Syrian authorities: the immediate divulging of all information available on the status of a number of American hostages in Syria, including Austin Tice, a young journalist kidnapped more than 12 years ago; and the opening up of the former regime’s chemical and biological weapons programmes to international scrutiny (something made theoretically more difficult by Israeli strikes on those buildings).

The challenges facing Syria are immense and the removal of American sanctions does not solve any of the country’s domestic problems. There is a cash crisis; crime has not been under control for 15 years; too many people have guns and do not want to give them up; militias need to be broken and their members separated from each other; civic peace must be kept at all costs, something that seems fragile beyond imagination. American sanctions relief solves none of those problems, but it makes the road ahead less hard. This is, as Trump says, Syria’s first ‘chance at greatness’ in more than 50 years.