The five Syrians arrested at their home by secret police last year were not rebels, spies or suspected infidels to President Bashar al-Assad. Instead, according to a Washington Post article, they were “targets” in a desperate new phase of Assad’s battle for survival: the cash hunt.
According to the report, all five were executives of Syria’s second largest mobile phone company, MTN Syria. Their arrests were part of the president’s campaign to seize MTN’s assets, along with almost every other major source of revenue in Syria’s devastated economy.
MTN finally knelt down four months ago after prolonged pressure that the arrests were followed by multimillion-dollar payment claims, threats to revoke the company’s license and a questionable court ruling.
The South African-based company announced in August that it was leaving the Syrian market under conditions described by the CEO as “intolerable”. MTN’s mobile towers are still operational, while its 6 million subscribers are still paying their monthly bills.
“But where this money is going, no one knows,” said a company official who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “Honestly, no one knows.” Similar events have taken place over the past two years, with Assad and his impoverished regime raiding or seizing dozens of businesses, including foreign companies and family businesses that led to the ouster of the decade. government-controlled, according to US and other Western officials, Neither the Syrian government nor the Syrian presidency responded to requests for comment on the report.
In an escalating campaign, the Syrian leader and his financially strapped regime have raided and seized dozens of businesses. Companies that had survived the war have experienced several visits in recent years by groups of “auditors” and agents of the Assad regime. At the same time, other businessmen have been arrested and pressured to raise money for alleged charities that are considered friendly to Syrian President Assad. These moves are characterized as “mafia moves” by many in Syria.
Even members of the Assad family have not escaped. Last year, Assad ousted Rami Makhlouf’s cousin from companies and confiscated assets that were once part of a vast portfolio estimated by Syrian experts worth up to $ 10 billion. intense economic pressure on a regime that has gone bankrupt since the war, horrific debts to Iran and Russia, the collapse of neighboring Lebanon’s financial sector, and ongoing economic sanctions from the West.
“Assad needs the money,” officials and experts said, “to pay the army and its security services, buy fuel and food for the capital and other areas still under regime control, and reward them.” some Syrian elites who remained loyal to him during the war. “
U.S. officials and experts in Syria have also said that Assad has so effectively consolidated his control over the country’s security apparatus and economy that he is ready to emerge from the war with more firm control of power than when he began. But after a decade of conflict, he remains head of a fragmented and decimated state, where almost half of Syria is beyond the reach of his government, entire cities are in ruins and the currency has lost 85% of its value since the beginning of the war.
Washington Post
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