Damascus under Fire for Poor Handling of Bread, Gasoline Shortages

Men arrange bread to cool down in Damascus, Syria. (Reuters)
Men arrange bread to cool down in Damascus, Syria. (Reuters)
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Damascus under Fire for Poor Handling of Bread, Gasoline Shortages

Men arrange bread to cool down in Damascus, Syria. (Reuters)
Men arrange bread to cool down in Damascus, Syria. (Reuters)

The Syrian government ordered that daily family bread rations be reduced after failing to provide subsidized bread and gasoline to the people. The move sparked outrage among the public, who accused Damascus of “starving” the people to cover up for its shortcomings.

The state news agency SANA announced a new mechanism for people to buy bread that went into effect on Saturday. A family of one or two people will be allowed one packet of bread per day, while a family of three or four will be allowed two. A family of five or six will be allowed three and a family of seven or more will be allowed four.

Prior to the new decision, families all received four packets of bread.

The decision applied to all bakeries in Damascus, the Damascus countryside and Latakia.

The government said the move was part of its efforts to “fairly” meet the needs of the people and “prevent the manipulation of bread prices”.

In recent weeks, government-held regions in Syria have seen people, who are already suffering from poverty due to years of war, clamoring to secure bread at subsidized prices. Queues not seen in nine years of war would line up at bakeries. Many bakeries have also been forced to close due to a flour shortage.

The price of an eight-loaf packet of subsidized bread is sold at 50 pounds. The same packet is sold at 500 pounds on the black market.

The government’s latest move sparked ire on the streets. A teacher told Asharq Al-Awsat: “They claim that they are seeking fairness and preventing price manipulation, but the truth is clear to see. The government is seeking to cover its shortcomings at the expense of the people.”

He said some families have become so impoverished that they can only rely on government subsidies. Very few families can afford a 500-pound packet of bread, he added.

The United Nations estimates that 87 percent of people in government-held territories are living under the poverty line. Their income is no more than 60,000 pounds, while a family of five needs at least 500,000 pounds to support itself.

Prior to the eruption of the conflict in 2011, Syria used to produce 4 million tons of wheat per year, of which 1.5 million tons was exported. According to the UN, Syria produced 1.2 million tons of wheat in 2019, the lowest figure in 29 years. Government-held regions need 1 to 1.5 million tons of wheat.

The regions of al-Jazira, Hasaka, Deir Ezzor and Raqqa, all of which are now controlled by the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces, as well as Aleppo, produce the bulk of Syria’s wheat for the country’s 23 million people.

Gasoline shortage
On top of a bread crisis, the people also have to contend with a severe gasoline shortage that has led to long queues of cars lined up at gas stations. Amid the hardship, some Syrians have joked that the country should enter the record books for the longest queues at stations.

The government has limited private vehicles to 30 liters of gasoline every four days, with residents saying hundreds of motorists wait for hours before gas stations are opened.

The shortages were worsened by major maintenance at the Baniyas refinery, the country’s largest, which supplied two-thirds of the country’s gasoline needs, said oil minister Bassam Touma.

Touma said once unavoidable maintenance work at the 130,000 barrel per day capacity refinery had been completed in the next 10 days, capacity would rise by 25%. Shipments from several undisclosed sources would also help ease the crisis later this month, he added.

Oil production collapsed after Damascus lost most of its oil producing fields in a stretch east of the Euphrates River in Deir Ezzor. These oil fields are now in the hands of US backed SDF, who continue to sell part of the oil to Damascus.

Syria had previously relied on Iranian oil shipments but tightening sanctions on Iran, Syria and their allies have dried up supplies in the past year.

Oil traders say oil imports through Beirut port, a major conduit, have also been disrupted in the wake of a major explosion last August.

Washington has long accused Syria of smuggling oil through Lebanon across a porous border area where Damascus’s ally Iranian-backed Hezbollah holds sway.

A shortfall in foreign currency had also forced Damascus to import less fuel in the last two months, further worsening supplies, two traders said.



'Where's the Gold?': How the Assads Sucked Syria Dry

Mountain lair: a soldier looks into a hidden exit from from Maher al-Assad's private office built into a hilltop overlooking Damascus. Bakr ALKASEM / AFP
Mountain lair: a soldier looks into a hidden exit from from Maher al-Assad's private office built into a hilltop overlooking Damascus. Bakr ALKASEM / AFP
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'Where's the Gold?': How the Assads Sucked Syria Dry

Mountain lair: a soldier looks into a hidden exit from from Maher al-Assad's private office built into a hilltop overlooking Damascus. Bakr ALKASEM / AFP
Mountain lair: a soldier looks into a hidden exit from from Maher al-Assad's private office built into a hilltop overlooking Damascus. Bakr ALKASEM / AFP

From a Bond villain lair in the rugged heights overlooking Damascus, the all-seeing eye of a notorious Syrian military unit gazed down on a city it bled dry.

Many of the bases of the elite Fourth Division formerly run by toppled president Bashar al-Assad's feared younger brother Maher now lie looted.

But papers left strewn behind reveal how the man they called "The Master" and his cronies wallowed in immense wealth while some of their foot soldiers struggled to feed their families and even begged on the streets.

Piles of documents seen by AFP expose a vast economic empire that Maher al-Assad and his network of profiteers built by pillaging a country already impoverished by nearly 14 years of civil war.

Western governments long accused him and his entourage of turning Syria into a narco state, flooding the Middle East with captagon.

But far beyond that $10-billion trade -- whose vast scale was exposed in a 2022 AFP investigation -- papers found in its abandoned posts show the Fourth Division had its fingers in many pies in Syria, an all-consuming "mafia" within the pariah state.

+ It expropriated homes and farms

+ Seized food, cars and electronics to sell on

+ Looted copper and metal from bombed-out buildings

+ Collected "fees" at roadblocks and checkpoints

+ Ran protection rackets, making firms pay for escorts of oil tankers, some from areas controlled by extremists

+ Controlled the tobacco and metal trades

Mountain eyrie

The center of this corrupt web was Maher al-Assad's private offices, hidden in an underground labyrinth of tunnels -- some big enough to drive a truck through -- cut into a mountain above Damascus.

A masked guard took AFP through the tunnels with all the brisk efficiency of a tour guide -- the sauna, the bedroom, what appeared to be cells and various "emergency" exit routes.

But at its heart, down a steep flight of 160 stairs, lay a series of vaults with iron-clad doors.

The guard said he had counted nine vaults behind one sealed-off room.

He said safes had been "broken open" by looters who entered the office just hours after the Assad brothers fled Syria on December 8 when Damascus fell to an offensive, ending the family's five-decade rule.

Maher, 57, did not know of his brother's plans to flee to Russia and escaped separately, taking a helicopter to the Iraqi border, according to a senior Iraqi security official and two other sources. He then made his way to Russia, they said, apparently via Iran.

The chaos of their fall is apparent in the underground complex. Safes and empty Rolex and Cartier watch boxes still lie scattered about, though it is not known if the vaults were emptied before the looters arrived.

"This is Maher al-Assad's main office," the guard said, "which has two floors above the ground but also tunnels containing locked rooms that can't be opened."

In one corridor, a shrink wrap machine -- probably used for bundling cash -- was abandoned next to a huge safe.

Hidden fortune

There was never any shortage of bills to wrap.

One document retrieved from the papers that litter the Fourth Division's Security Bureau farther down the hill show they had ready cash of $80 million, eight million euros and 41 billion Syrian pounds at their fingertips in June. That was a perfectly normal cash float, according to papers going back to 2021.

"This is only a small sample of the wealth that Maher and his associates gathered from their shady business deals," said Carnegie Middle East Centre scholar Kheder Khaddour.

Their real fortune is probably hidden abroad”, he said.

"The Fourth Division was a money-making machine," Khaddour added, preying on a land where the UN says more than 90 percent of the population was living on a little more than $2 a day.

State within a state

Western sanctions to squeeze the Assads and their cronies did little to impede Maher and his men.

Theirs was an "independent state" within the state, said Omar Shaaban, a former Fourth Division colonel who has signed a deal with the new Syrian authorities.

"It had all the means... It had everything," he said.

While the US dollar was officially banned under Assad -- with Syrians not even allowed to utter the word -- Shaaban said many Fourth Division officers grew "wealthy and had safes full of money".

"In dollars," naturally, Shaaban added.

Maher's cronies lived in sprawling villas, shipping luxury cars abroad while beyond their gates the country was mired in poverty and despair.

Weeks after the Assads' fall, desperate people were still combing through Maher's mansion built into a hill in Damascus' Yaafour neighborhood next to the stables where his daughter rode her prize-winning horses.

"I want the gold. Where's the gold?" a man asked AFP as he went through its ransacked rooms. But all that was left were old photographs of Maher, his wife and their three children strewn on the floor.

'The butcher'

Maher was a shadowy, menacing figure in Assad's Syria, branded "the butcher" by the opposition. His Fourth Division was the ousted regime's iron fist, linked to a long list of atrocities.

But while his portrait was hung in all their bases, he was seldom seen in public.

Despite rights groups accusing him of ordering the 2011 massacre of protesters in Daraa -- which helped ignite the civil war -- and the United Nations linking him to the 2005 assassination of ex-Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri, he was "the invisible man", one person close to the former ruling family told AFP.

"Few people would tell you that they know him," the source said.

Yet Maher could be generous and good company, according to his sister-in-law Majd al-Jadaan, a longtime opponent of the regime.

"However, when he gets angry, he completely loses control... This is what makes his personality terrifying," she told Al-Arabiya TV.

"He knows how to destroy -- he knows how to kill and then lie to appear innocent," Jadaan told French TV early in the civil war, saying he was as ruthless as his father, Hafez.

Luxury cars

One other name keeps cropping up alongside Maher's when people in Damascus curse the crimes of the Fourth Division.

Ghassan Belal was the head of its powerful Security Bureau. Like his boss, he collected luxury cars and lived in a villa in the Yaafour district. Belal has also left Syria, according to security sources.

Inside his spacious offices in the bureau's headquarters, you can piece together his lavish lifestyle bill by bill from the papers he left, including the cost of running his Cadillac.

Over the summer, Belal shipped two cars, a Lexus and a Mercedes, the $29,000 customs and other expenses charged to a credit card under another name.

A handwritten note showed that despite being sanctioned for human rights abuses, he paid his Netflix subscription using a "friend's foreign credit card".

Another list showed that mostly domestic expenses for his properties, including his main villa -- which has since also been looted -- amounted to $55,000 for just 10 days in August.

That same month, a Fourth Division soldier wrote to Belal begging for help because he was in "a terrible financial situation". Belal gave him 500,000 Syrian pounds -- $33. Another soldier who abandoned his post was caught begging on the street.

The money men

While thousands of the papers were burned as the regime fell, many of the classified documents survived the flames and have tales to tell.

Among prominent names mentioned as paying into Fourth Division funds are sanctioned businessmen Khaled Qaddour, Raif Quwatli and the Katerji brothers, who have been accused of generating hundreds of millions of dollars for Iran's Revolutionary Guard and the Yemeni Houthis through the sale of Iranian oil to Syria and China.

Quwatli operated checkpoints and crossings where goods were often confiscated or "taxed", multiple sources said.

Qaddour -- who was sanctioned by the United States for bankrolling Maher through captagon, cigarette and mobile phone smuggling -- denied having any dealings with him when he tried to have his EU sanctions lifted in 2018.

But the Security Bureau's revenue list showed he paid $6.5 million into its coffers in 2020 alone.

'It was a mafia'

Khaddour said the Security Bureau handled most of the division's financial dealings and issued security cards for people it did business with to ease their movements.

A drug lord told Lebanese investigators in 2021 that he held a Fourth Division security card and that the Security Bureau had agreed to protect another dealer's drug shipment for $2 million, according to a statement seen by AFP.

The US Treasury and several Syrian and Lebanese security figures have also cited Belal and the bureau as key players in the captagon trade.

AFP visited a captagon lab linked to the division in December in a villa in the Dimas area near Lebanon's border, its rooms full of boxes and barrels of the caffeine, ethanol and paracetamol needed to make the drug.

Locals said they were not allowed to approach the villa, with shepherds banned from the surrounding hills.

A former Fourth Division officer who worked for Belal, and who asked not to be named, said the bureau enjoyed "so much immunity, no one could touch a member without Maher's approval."

"It was a mafia, and I knew I was working for a mafia," he added.

'They left people in hunger'

The division's unbridled greed haunted families for decades as a letter written by Adnan Deeb, a graveyard caretaker from Homs, shows.

His plea for the return of his family's seized property was found among hundreds of damp and dirty documents at an abandoned checkpoint near Damascus.

When AFP tracked Deeb down, he told how the Fourth Division confiscated his family's villa, and those of several of their neighbors in the village of Kafraya 10 years ago.

Despite not being allowed near them, Deeb said they still had to pay taxes on the properties, which were used as offices, warehouses and likely a jail.

"The Fourth Division Security Bureau here was a red line that no one dared to come close to," the son of one of the owners told AFP.

They found hundreds of cars, motorcycles and hundreds of gallons of cooking oil in the properties after the regime fell.

"They left people in hunger while everything was available for them," he said.

A woman with 25 family members -- some living in a tent -- repeatedly requested the Fourth Division give her back her home in a document found in another of the villas.

Bashar got his cut

The Fourth Division controlled no part of the Syrian economy more than the metals market, with former colonel Shaaban saying "no one was permitted to move iron" without its approval.

It also had "exclusive" control of copper, he said.

When Assad's forces took control of a Damascus suburb after a fierce battle with the opposition, the Fourth Division swiftly sent its men to pull the copper and iron from destroyed homes, one of its officers recalled.

Fares Shehabi, former head of Syria's Chamber of Industry said a metal plant managed by one of Maher al-Assad's partners monopolized the market, with factories forced to buy exclusively from it.

Many "could no longer operate" under such pressure, Shehabi said.

Maher al-Assad and his "friends" controlled a big share of Syria's economy, he said. But the ultimate beneficiary was always his brother Bashar, he argued. "It was one company. The (presidential) palace was always the reference."

The former Fourth Division officer also insisted a share of profits and seized items always went to the president.

Toxic legacy

While little seems to be left of Fourth Division today other than its ransacked depots and headquarters, Syria expert Lars Hauch, of Conflict Mediation Solutions (CMS), warned its legacy could yet be highly toxic.

"The Fourth Division was a military actor, a security apparatus, an intelligence entity, an economic force, a political power, and a transnational criminal enterprise," he said.

"An institution with a decades-long history, enormous financial capacity and close relations with elites doesn't just vanish," he added.

"While the top-level leadership fled the country, the committed and mostly Alawite core (from which the Assads come)... retreated to the coastal regions," Hauch said.

Syria's new leadership has repeatedly sought to reassure minorities they will not be harmed. But across the country, violence against Alawites has surged.

Hauch said caches of weapons may have been hidden away.

Add to that the division's war chest of "billions of dollars", and "you have what you need for a sustained insurgency... if Syria's transition fails to achieve genuine inclusivity and transitional justice," the analyst warned.