Eurasia Press & News
On New Year’s Eve last December, Syria’s President Ahmed Al-Sharaa, barely a few weeks after toppling the regime of Bashar Al-Assad, gathered the most senior commanders of the Syrian opposition’s fragmented and often fractious factions to declare their official victory over the Baathist regime.
During his proclamation, he warned that “power, wealth and weapons lead to widespread tyranny if not governed by values and ethics”.
Almost a year later, a recent report details how Al-Sharaa has personally intervened to warn his senior leadership from enriching themselves as a result of their new positions in government.
He has also reportedly moved to sideline his own brother, who was using his family connection to the new president to set up private business meetings.
However, with two of his other brothers now playing key roles in the government, overseeing foreign investment and chairing official meetings with visiting dignitaries, there are concerns that Al-Sharaa may be building a system of opaque family-centric governance reminiscent of Assad’s.
Under Assad, corruption was the rule, not the exception
Whilst Al-Sharaa rode into power on the back of a modernised and professionalised micro-state in Idlib’s Syrian Salvation Government, the Assad regime had been rotting from within – the state essentially eaten away by decades of corruption and mismanagement.
“Under Assad, corruption was the rule, not the exception,” Mohammed Bassiki, an investigative journalist and founder of the Syrian Investigative Reporting Accountability Initiative, told The New Arab. “It was present at every level of society.”
According to Bassiki, Assad built a regime that, despite establishing anti-corruption legislation and institutions like the Central Agency for Financial Control, relied on corruption to survive.
“The regime’s dealings with business were like a black box,” he explains. “Assad surrounded himself with a network of front companies and corrupt business elites.” The deal was simple: loyalty was exchanged for the possibility of self-enrichment – largely at the expense of service provision or the public well-being.
Similar corrupt practices were utilised to win loyalty amongst key constituencies, particularly those from his coastal Alawite heartlands. Bassiki points to Bassel Al-Assad Military Hospital in Tartous as a prime example.
“[The hospital] had seven hundred employees on paper,” he explains. “Only two hundred actually worked there – the vast majority were just illegally collecting salaries.”
Such practices were widespread and a conscious strategy to bind parts of the populace to the beneficence of the regime.
Assad’s military similarly did not escape the rot. “Corruption and bribery were characteristic of military life,” Eyad Hamid, the head of the Human Rights and Business Unit of the Syrian Legal Development Programme, told TNA.
“You had to pay to be exempt from military service, pay to be assigned a better role within the military, and pay to end the compulsory service.”
It was common for frontline soldiers to get permission from their commanding officers to return home and work a second job on the condition that they paid up part of their salary. “This system of illegal payments didn’t end with these officers, but each layer in the hierarchy shifted money upwards towards the centre of power,” Hamid explains. “It was systematic.”
The effects were deeply corrosive for the Assad regime. “Corruption is an invasive rot that slips into the backbone of a country and eats it hollow from within,” Mohammed Al-Basha, the founder of the Basha Report, a US-based risk advisory focused on the Middle East, explains to TNA.
“It destroys trust, hollows out institutions, and turns government into a private cash register instead of a system designed to serve the public.”
“[The impact of corruption] cuts across all aspects of society. Rendering any meaningful reconstruction under Assad basically impossible,” concurs Hamid, pointing to the large swathes of Syria that remain in ruins – in many neighbourhoods, almost a decade after fighting stopped.
Ultimately, corruption played a key role in the final collapse of the regime – the military, increasingly hollowed out from within, crumbled in the face of HTS’s December offensive, whilst large parts of the country that had suffered from years of predations under Assad’s zombie-state, took to the streets to celebrate their liberation.
The challenges Al-Sharaa faces
Assad’s fall did not mark an end to the corrupt structure he had created. The system he left behind – corroded, opaque, and corrupt – is the one Al-Sharaa now inherits, and the job of rectifying it will be complicated, according to analysts.
Yet, a year on from the fall of the former regime, “several important steps have already been taken,” Benjamin Fève, a Senior Research Analyst at Karam Shaar Advisory, tells TNA. “Officials are being told to disclose private interests and refrain from entering business ventures whilst in office.”
In January, the government kicked off a plan to target ghost employees – salary-collecting workers who exist on paper only – by pledging to fire a third of all public sector workers and privatise much of Syria’s state-owned enterprise.
However, such a move will disproportionately impact the Alawite community, who were overrepresented in the public sector, raising concerns that mass firings will lead to more poverty, discontent, and potentially violence on the Syrian coast.
Hamid also argues that “if people’s salaries don’t allow them to have decent living standards, the pressure to take bribes will always be there”.
The new government has inherited the facade of Assad’s anti-corruption mechanisms, but the key to success rests on actually empowering them to identify corruption and hold those responsible to account, argues Hamid.
A new leadership team has been put in place to lead the Central Agency for Financial Control, which is working to restore “communication with several international oversight organisations,” alongside the “automating an electronic complaints and reporting platform,” according to a statement by Wasim Al-Mansour, the agency’s deputy head.
Mansour also announced that investigations “have been opened into 50 cases of corruption,” although it is unclear whether these date from the Assad period or pertain to the new government. The Central Agency for Financial Control did not respond to a request for comment.
Whilst there has been progress, “the picture remains mixed,” Fève explains. “Many of the settlement deals made with Assad-era ‘cronies’ remain very opaque.”
Equally, there are concerns around the awarding of government rebuilding contracts, which have largely lacked public tendering or independent oversight.
Fève highlights the recent deal with an energy consortium led by Qatar’s UCC Holding, worth $7 billion, to redevelop the Syrian energy grid, due to “a number of opaque ties between its chairman Moaz al-Khayyat and the government,” as emblematic of this problem.
In another incident, an Italian firm, which signed a construction deal worth $2 billion, was later found to have only one employee and reported revenue of 200,000 euros – raising questions about how they were able to win the bid.
Despite this, Syria remains in a post-conflict transitional phase and so is “on the right track,” argues Fève, but the process of unwinding Assad’s corrupt state requires time and effort. He stresses the importance of “building independent, durable institutions” as the key step to ensuring transparency and combating corruption.
Analysts agree that the international community can play a key role in ensuring that this happens. Syria’s new government is courting the support and investment of foreign governments, businesses and international organisations – which provides them with a degree of leverage to pressure for strong anti-corruption measures.
Fève suggests that the international community could “make financial disbursements conditional on transparent practices and independently audited finances”.
With the scale and immediate need for reconstruction financing – alongside the legacy of corruption in post-Assad Syria – there remains a risk that in the rush to rebuild, corrupt practices are allowed to fester and embed themselves within the new system.
The work to ensure this doesn’t happen will be “long and complicated,” says Bassiki. “But all Syrians have paid the price of this corruption and seen the damage it has done – so we all know that for us to build a better country, we can’t allow it to raise its head again.”
