BMI Research states that Syria’s economy will contract at an annual 3.9 percent from 2016 to 2019 as civil war rages on, according to Business Insider. Growth is expected to return in 2020, but only through humanitarian assistance and investment from Russia and Iran. Syria’s GDP has plummeted since 2011.
Syria’s nightmare is a regional conflict with global stakes. It exemplifies the eclipse of US efforts at regime changes, whereas Chinese policy holds the promise of economic development. However, time is running out.
Syria has been engulfed in military conflict for more than four years. These battles have cost the Middle Eastern nation more than a quarter million lives and led to a population decrease of 23 percent with over four million refugees registered in neighboring countries.
In an effort to save an economy plagued by war and inner turmoil, Syrian authorities are cutting imports to increase export capacity. The Syrian central bank is offering fewer licenses to importers while refusing to offer a decent exchange rate.
Syria will take about a year to assemble and destroy its arsenal of chemical weapons, said its President Bashar al-Assad on Wednesday, though he insisted that his government’s cooperation had not been borne out of America’s military threat.
During an interview with U.S. broadcaster Fox News, Assad said that his government intends to “fully cooperate” with the U.S.-Russian plan to decommission the regime’s chemical weapons, but denied any responsibility for the gas attack that killed more than 1,000 people in the city of Ghouta last month.
The crisis in Syria has quickly morphed into a U.S.-Russian confrontation. Russia’s goal is to be seen as an equal of the United States, while Obama must tackle both domestic and international sentiment to dispel doubts about America’s preeminent global status.
In the wake of President Barack Obama’s change of tack from a strike on Syria, the threat of war has not dissolved. It has, however, been pushed off beyond this round of negotiations.
The Syrian civil war has been ongoing since 15 March 2011. Though the roots of the conflict are political by nature, Syria’s depleting oil and gas reserves also played a major role in sparking the unrest: When oil exports dropped, the government suddenly found itself unable able to pay for programs that had been placating its citizens to some degree.
In my view, oil and gas resource limits are major contributors to the conflict in Syria. This is happening in several ways:
Leaders from Russia and the Arab League on Wednesday offered to broker talks between the Syrian opposition and President Bashar Assad’s regime, in order to end the country’s two-year-long civil war, which has thus far claimed over 70,000 lives, the Associated Press reported.
Unlike recent military interventions in Mali or Libya, the West and its Middle Eastern partners have chosen to pursue a middle-ground approach in Syria by providing logistical aid to the various Syrian rebel factions, rather than intervening directly. This method of ‘partial intervention’ is likely to have long-term consequences for foreign powers, and particularly for Saudi Arabia.
A U.N.-sponsored summit in Kuwait on Wednesday will call for a drastic increase in international relief funds for nearly 5 million Syrians, reported the Associated Press, following fresh reports of atrocities inflicted on the civilian population, including 78 bodies found floating along a river in the city of Aleppo on Tuesday.
