Aleppo, Syria – To understand the Shakedown Empire, which was once Syria under the former President Bashar Assad, look at the notorious Al-Khatib prison and the torture center.
Embedded in a leaf district of Damascus, a so-called department for financial crimes by the secret services in Syria would track down successful business people and in fetid cells in al-Khatib Sardinen until it gave her profit.
“Al-Khatib was not about being guilty or not,” said Mustafa Nana. “They didn't care. They only wanted cash. If you had it, they would pack them and blackmail their family. “He spent months in a cell and shared a potato with two cell comrades for breakfast and lunch before his family paid tens of thousands of dollars to get it out.
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Parts over
A rebel coalition brought a quick end to Assad's corrupt regime last month. However, deleting his dark heritage will probably take much longer because the country's new leaders with an economy with almost 14 years of war, deeply rooted corruption and international sanctions claim.
These factors have left Syria in rubble. Of its 23 million people, 69% make $ 3.65 per day according to the World Bank. The Syrian pound suffered between 2011-as anti-assadic protests and 2023 a 300-fold depreciation against the US dollar. A similar contraction hit the gross domestic product, which shrank from a high of $ 67 billion to less than one sixth.
A rebel fighter inspects the writings on a cell wall in the Al-Khatib prison in the Capital Damascus on December 14th.
(Louai Beshara/Getty Images)
Millions of Syrians of working age remain abroad, while large parts of the country are in ruins. The reconstruction was estimated at the cost between 350 and 500 billion US dollars. It is reported that foreign exchange of $ 17 billion has dropped to a few hundred million US dollars before the war.
A shopkeeper sits in his shop on the Old City Market in Damascus.
(Omar Sanadiki / Associated Press)
The reversal of one of these numbers is not an easy task, say experts.
“The country's most important economic relationships are based on conflicts, be it in relation to the military that control directly controlling industries or rely on humanitarian aid or smuggling,” said Rabie Nassr, co -founder of the Vienna -based Syria Center for Political Research. He added that the economy would need a wholesale reorientation than a redistribution of resources in favor of the winners.
In the time of Hafez Assad, Bashar's father Syria was a socialist economy with Soviet nationalization and strict regulation. His son took a neoliberal attack and although some initiatives were successful, they came with higher corruption and inequality. The oil corresponds to two thirds of exports, while the country was able to produce 4 million tons of wheat every year, which made it a net exporter (although a series of droughts lowered this number before the crisis).
The conflict changed all this and compulsion to import Syria to import oil from Assad allies such as Iran – the estimated 40 billion US dollars and wheat from Russia. The fights destroyed a large part of the country's industrial basis and pushed around 4.85 million people out as refugees. Economically important parts of the country, such as the resource -rich northeast and the bastion of the rebels in the northwest, remained from the control of Assad. By 2024, The World Bank estimated This one of the largest participants in the Syria Economic Sector was Captagon, an inferior, illegal amphetamine.
The Qadam station N Damascus was damaged during the civil war between rebel dispute and the military of President Bashar Assad.
(Omar Sanadiki / Associated Press)
The priority of the caretaker government now is to collect cash and bring enough stability to attract investments. Although it has its hopes for the revival of both oil and agriculture, most Syrian oil fields and a large part of its arable land in the northeast, which supported by the United States, are controlled by Kurdish forces that have so far refused, The new authorities to integrate into integration. The renovation of oil fields in other areas is difficult, with some observers say what reserves remain up to the point where further extraction would be economically impossible.
Several governments – including Saudi Arabia, Ukraine and Qatar – have promised to provide help that should temporarily cover deficits, while the new Syrian business world's new authorities have carried out both on site and in the diaspora overitus.
You can point out some immediate improvements. The Syrian pound has stabilized and even improved compared to his Nadir under Assad compared to the dollar. And the blackmail practices of his regime's impact on the government's protective payments for the transport of shipments, bribes in order to pass control points, to adopt the fees for double charging and the shakedowns in al-Khatib.
Another measure is the relaxation of the import restrictions that should give local companies the opportunity to access cheaper tariffs. But counteract the factory owners is a double -edged sword, since locally produced products have little chance against foreign colleagues.
“If you open the market completely, we are doomed to fail,” said a manufacturer based in Damascus, who refused to give its name to speak freely.
Other resentments remain. The new authorities want to ensure that industrialists who have received the Assad war machine will be punished, while pro-Rebel business owners hope for an economic reorientation in their favor. At the same time, people who led business under the old regime have their place in the current landscape, especially in the hands of an inexperienced government.
The authorities develop Assad's business from the economy before saying that they will be a privatization drive. In recent years of his rule, Assad ordered the public infrastructure, including Damascus Airport, the port of Latakia and the mobile phone operators, the contracts with companies presented by his buddies, the income from Latakia and cell phone operators.
The sons of Samir al-Baghdadi-Mohammad Omar, left and Mohammad Ame shovels shovel on their father on January 12 during the civil war in the Qaboun district in Damascus, Syria.
(Omar Sanadiki / Associated Press)
A complication for investors will be ownership of companies that are connected in Russia, Iran, the Hisbollah of the Lebanese militant group and even the United Arab Emirates.
Projecting civil servants to reduce expenses by removing other parts of Assad's heir, including a bloated public sector and the nation's social security network.
In the past few weeks, the government announced that it will be evaluated by the employment lists for the ministry, ghost employees and people with several salaries removed and payments to the old government military and security personnel are suspended. Subsidies for staple clips such as bread stopped and triggered a 10-time price increase. These movements have already introduced an acidic reference to the post-assadic euphoria in the population.
Samir al-Baghdadi, 46, jumps on January 11th from a wall of his family in the Qaboun district of Damascus, which was destroyed during the civil war.
(Omar Sanadiki / Associated Press)
Apart from these concerns, everyone who deals with Syria must navigate from the USA, Great Britain, the European Union and the United Nations. Although they aim at a regime that no longer exists, the western powers have conditioned them in order to remove them to the behavior of the new rulers of Syria, which even as part of Hay'ah Tahrir al-sham, the Islamist faction, displaced the Assad , to be sanctioned.
In an interview in the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad Al-Shaibani said that the lifting of the sanctions “The key” for the stability of Syria was.
“The reason for these sanctions is now in Moscow,” said Shaibani, referring to Assad, who escaped into the Russian capital.