Sanctions without exit? The compliance paradox of international counterterrorism regimes and the Syrian insurgency

International counterterrorism sanctions are designed to change the behaviour of designated groups, yet they offer few credible mechanisms for recognising such change when it occurs. This article examines these tensions through the 1267 United Nations (UN) sanctions regime against al-Qaeda and Islamic State applied to the Syrian insurgency, which culminated in the delisting of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a former al-Qaeda affiliate, an outcome achieved less through established institutional procedures than as a fait accompli. The article identifies a compliance paradox in the 1267 regime: it contributed to changing HTS’s behaviour, yet its institutional architecture made it bureaucratically and politically unable to recognise that change through formal delisting mechanisms. In practice, the 1267 regime deterred engagement with parts of the armed opposition in Syria, contributed to the insurgency’s fragmentation, and incentivised several groups to distance themselves from global jihad. But delisting ultimately required HTS’s seizure of Damascus, which forced a series of ad hoc decisions that the 1267 framework failed to produce institutionally. This suggests that counterterrorism sanctions regimes, which depoliticise their targets and lack credible exit pathways, risk entrenching the conflicts they are meant to transform, with implications extending beyond Syria to cases such as Afghanistan, the Sahel and Somalia.