Syria's businesses start to fight back in hope that era of extortion and tariffs is over

Merchants look to the future as roadblocks fall and trading across whole nation may open up

After five decades of a worsening economy, business owners are looking to the future. AFP

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In the old quarter of Damascus, antique carpet dealer Issam Ahmad is preparing for a demolition project, just as his country is looking to rebuild. In the coming days, he will knock down the tall, thick concrete walls surrounding his shop, built to protect his stock from extortion gangs who had proliferated under the regime in the last decade.

His shop in the Hariqa area currently stocks only cheap Chinese carpets as most of the world's nations refused to allow exports to Syria. Pro-regime protection rackets proliferated during the last decade of the old regime, extracting money from businesses in exchange for allowing them to stay open, so he scaled back his business so as not to draw attention.

“I will be soon getting rid of this junk,” Mr Ahmad said.

Barely a week after former president Bashar Al Assad was overthrown in a lightning 12-day push by rebels, Syrians like Mr Ahmad – mercantile people throughout the ages – are swiftly returning to what they excel at: commerce.

On the main highway leading from the south to Damascus, Qassem Al Zubi sped up in his truck to deliver tomatoes to the central market in the capital for the first time since the army erected road blocks, days after the outbreak of the 2011 revolt against Assad family rule. “This was the dirtiest road block in Syria," said Mr Al Zubi, pointing out the barrier near the city of Samamin, where members of the elite Fourth Armoured Division charged to let people and goods in and out, and arrested those suspected of supporting the pro-democracy protest movement.

A dozen of the division’s once-feared tanks lay motionless at the remnants of the barrier. Their crews, soldiers in what the regime’s press called Jaish Bashar, “the army of Bashar”, had abandoned them when the regime fell on December 8. For now, at least, goods can be transported along the roads of Syria without being stopped at one or more of hundreds of checkpoints run by different groups, many of which levied high charges to allow them to pass.

A blip in Syria's long mercantile history

Before a junta took over power in Syria in the late 1950s and socialised the economy, Syria was developmentally on par with South Korea. One of the two countries became an economic powerhouse; the other became an economic backwater.

As Syria’s financial might began to wane, its workers smuggled themselves into Lebanon and countries farther afield in search of half-decent wages. The middle classes, including merchants and bankers, also left the country as the new rulers imposed a command economy and banned most private enterprises.

In 1963, Alawite officers came to power in a coup in the majority Sunni country, giving way to one of their own, Hafez Al Assad in 1970. Shortages became so rife that Syrians returning to visit from abroad often brought basic necessities like bread and toilet paper home with them. Bashar Al Assad ushered in economic liberalisation soon after he inherited power in 2000, but the benefits mostly went to what became Alawite oligarchs, who often employed Sunnis as frontmen, or as junior partners.

The societal and economic imbalances this created contributed to the start of the 2011 protest movement that the regime crushed by killing thousands of civilians. By the end of that year, a civil war was raging. Rural Syrians in southern Deraa and elsewhere, who were the main losers from Mr Al Assad’s economic policies because stagnation hit the countryside hard, constituted the core of the armed rebels.

Now entrepreneurs and traders all over the country are hoping that the extortion and secret police nexus that underpinned the old order will become an anomaly in the history of a proud nation. Syria once partly belonged to Mesopotamia, the cradle of the ancient world, and was a key stop on the Silk Road trading routes.

Syria's new government, led by rebel militant group Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, has told business leaders that it will adopt a free-market model and integrate the country into the global economy after years of economic isolation and sanctions.

A couple of days after Mr Al Assad fell, Sameh Al Sharif, a Deraa car dealer, started making connections with potential customers in Damascus. But there has not been much interest yet as people are waiting to see what the new government will do and how that will affect prices. The cost of goods is dropping already in expectation of an influx of imports from Turkey and elsewhere, and the end, at least for now, of the corruption that was a hallmark of the old order.

Mr Al Sharif used to pay $1,000 per vehicle, mostly to officers in the Political Security branch in Deraa, to let in his consignments of cars, imported from the Gulf through Jordan. “They enriched themselves by sitting down,” he said.