William Hague joins other European Union foreign ministers in Brussels to discuss fresh sanctions on Iran, aimed at deepening the country’s economic isolation following the attack on the British embassy in Tehran. Hague said the Iranian government had also helped the Syrian regime in its violent suppression of protests

The US, the EU and the Arab League have slammed new sanctions on the Syrian regime, following a damning UN report and the climbing death toll that has reportedly exceeded 4,000 people since March.

The new measures target Syrian VIPs and companies as well as the energy and financial sectors in the country. Damascus has already called the sanctions an economic war. The US has also blacklisted two more Syrian officials and two financial institutions.

Brussels agreed to impose new sanctions on Syria’s oil and financial sectors, and added 11 entities and 12 people to its list of those targeted by asset freezes and travel bans.

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, center, Dutch Foreign Minister Uri Rosenthal, left, Luxembourg's Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn, second left, and French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe, second right, look at British Foreign Secretary William Hague

The Arab League banned 17 Syrian VIPs from travel to Arab states, including President Bashar Assad’s brother Maher, who commands the military’s elite Republican Guard and is considered Syria’s second most powerful man. President Assad was not named in the travel blacklist.

Meanwhile, the opposition inside Syria has called for a general strike in an attempt to persuade the country’s business elite to give up their ties with the government.

On Thursday, the United Nations declared that Syria was in a state of civil war due to the staggering death toll and the high number of soldiers defecting to the opposition.

“We are placing the figure at 4,000, but the information coming to us is that it’s much more,” UN high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay said at a news conference in Geneva. “As soon as there were more and more defectors threatening to take up arms, I said this in August before the Security Council, that there’s going to be a civil war. And at the moment that’s how I am characterizing this.”

­But Ivan Eland, senior fellow at the Independence Institute,says the sanctions will only end up harming ordinary Syrians.

“Most recent sanctions are directed at financial transitions but of course that affects the whole Syrian economy which the West, Turkey and the Arab League are now trying to buckle to reduced support for Assad,”

Eland believes that imposing sanction on unfavorable regimes could only fuel insurgencies across the world. “We have to be careful about undermining the sovereignty of countries with sanctions and military action,” he said. “It would be a disaster to attack Syria to get rid of Assad.”