JTA — “Mouaz, what do you think, should I go?”

The day after Henry Hamra learned that Islamist rebels had ousted Bashar al-Assad from power — ending more than six decades of Ba’athist rule over Syria — he was on the phone with his friend Mouaz Moustafa, the executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force.

The unlikely alliance — a Syrian-American son of Palestinian refugees and a Syrian Jewish cantor whose uncle was Syria’s chief rabbi — would drive a yearlong campaign to lift punishing sanctions that Moustafa had helped bring about.

It would also place prominent Syrian American Jews opposite Israel’s government, which remains intensely wary of the new regime in Syria.

Hamra fled Syria with his family in 1992, after the Ba’athist government unexpectedly lifted the ban on Jews traveling abroad. But years of persecution along with the Ba’athist restrictions caused the displacement of more than 30,000 Jews over the course of the 20th century, essentially putting an end to one of the largest and oldest Jewish communities in the Middle East.

Hamra, speaking in a thick Brooklyn accent, recounted how he had watched his country fall apart. There was little he or his family could do from their exile. Henry’s father, Yosef Hamra, was a rabbi and leader of the Damascus Jewish community, and his uncle, Rabbi Avraham Hamra, who settled in Holon, Israel, after leaving Syria, served as the country’s last chief rabbi until 1994.

Moustafa, the son of a Palestinian refugee father and a Syrian mother, had wasted little time before heading back to Syria. By the time Hamra called, he had already been there. Moustafa’s reply was immediate, Hamra recalled: “Absolutely, I was just there, and I’m going back. You need to come with me.”

Moustafa founded the Syrian Emergency Task Force in March 2011 in response to the Assad government’s war on civilians in the wake of Arab Spring protests. Over the 14 years of civil war, the SETF became a mainstay of the Syrian opposition in exile, and Moustafa became a well-regarded political operative working on behalf of the Syrian people in Washington.

In 2014, Moustafa was put in touch with a Syrian military police photographer who fled the country with a flash drive containing evidence of systematic torture and mass executions in Assad’s prisons. The whistleblower, known publicly as “Caesar,” was 1st Lt. Farid al-Madhhan, a name he kept hidden for years to protect himself and his family, and only revealed after Assad’s fall in December 2024.

“The pictures were reminiscent of the worst moments of history,” Moustafa said. “Emaciated, tortured bodies, eyes gouged out, men, women, children, elderly, on a massive scale.”

The images set off a five-year lobbying campaign led by Moustafa, culminating in the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, signed by US President Donald Trump in December 2019, which sanctioned Assad regime officials and cut Syria off from the international financial system.

“When we drafted the Caesar Act,” Moustafa said, “we took all of that to pass a law that very specifically addressed the machinery of death of the Assad regime and how it needed to stop.”

After Assad’s ouster in December 2024, the Caesar sanctions, so effective at strangling his regime, threatened to do the same to Syria’s new government. So Moustafa enlisted Hamra’s help.

Moustafa had known Hamra since 2013 through his friendship with Avraham Hamra, Henry’s uncle. They had connected through Moustafa’s efforts to save Judaica from the Jobar Synagogue after it was bombed by forces loyal to Assad.

The friendship would result in Henry Hamra, who still resists describing himself as a political person, running for parliament in Syria’s first open elections since the Ba’ath party seized power in 1963. It would bring his father to recite a blessing over Ahmad al-Sharaa, the Islamist rebel commander who now serves as Syria’s president. And their relationship, and the efforts that followed, would help pave the way for the lifting of the US sanctions regime that had cut Syria off from the global economy.

“Would Caesar have been lifted without the Syrian Jewish community? I don’t believe it would have been,” Moustafa said.

By May 2025, the Treasury had already issued a 180-day waiver on the other Syrian sanctions, but the Caesar sanctions remained in place, able to be repealed only by an act of Congress. Trump officially lifted the Caesar sanctions on December 19, 2025, when he signed the FY 2026 NDAA into law, a year after Assad’s ouster.

This was Moustafa’s target, and the first step, as Moustafa recalled, was to help get the Hamras back to Syria. But there was much work to be done between that initial phone call and the moment Hamra set foot........

© The Times of Israel