Privatising Syria: US Plans Post-Assad Selloff

Editor’s Note: This investigation was previously published by MintPress News, a crusading independent media outlet well worth your time, and consideration. It is now reproduced here, with kind permission.

Following the abrupt fall of Bashar Assad’s government in Syria, much remains uncertain about the country’s future - including whether it can survive as a unitary state, or will splinter into smaller chunks in the manner of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. For the time being at least though, members of ultra-extremist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) appear highly likely to take key positions in whatever administrative structure sprouts from Bashar Assad’s ouster, after a decade-and-a-half of grinding Western-sponsored regime change efforts.

As Reuters reported December 12th, HTS is already “stamping its authority on Syria’s state with the same lightning speed that it seized the country, deploying police, installing an interim government and meeting foreign envoys.” Meanwhile, its bureaucrats - “who until last week were running an Islamist administration in a remote corner of Syria's northwest” - have moved en masse “into government headquarters in Damascus.” Mohammed Bashir, head of HTS’ “regional government” in extremist-occupied Idlib, has been appointed the country’s “caretaker prime minister”.

An HTS address in Damascus, from former Al Nusra emir Jolani

However, despite the chaos and precariousness of post-Assad Syria, one thing seems assured - the country will be broken open to Western economic exploitation, at long last. This is clear from multiple mainstream reports, which state HTS has informed local and international business leaders it will “adopt a free-market model and integrate the country into the global economy, in a major shift from decades of corrupt state control” when in office.

As Alexander McKay of the Marx Engels Lenin Institute says, state-controlled parts of Syria’s economy may have been under Assad, but corrupt they weren’t. He believes a striking feature of the ongoing attacks on Syrian infrastructure from forces within and without the country, is economic and industrial sites are a recurrent target. Moreover, the would-be HTS-dominated government has done nothing to counter these broadsides, when “securing key economic assets is vital to societal reconstruction, and should therefore be a matter of priority”:

“We can see clearly what kind of country these ‘moderate rebels’ plan to build. Forces like HTS are allied with US imperialism and their economic approach will reflect this. Prior to the proxy war, the government pursued an economic approach that mixed public ownership and market elements. State intervention enabled a degree of political independence other nations in the region lack. Assad’s administration understood without an industrial base, being sovereign is impossible. The new ‘free market’ approach will see all of that utterly decimated.”

‘Global Economy’

Syria’s economic independence, and strength, under Assad’s rule, and the benefits reaped by average citizens as a result, were never acknowledged in the mainstream before or during the Western-fomented dirty war. Yet, countless reports from major international institutions amply underline this reality - which has now been brutally vanquished, never to return. For example, an April 2015 World Health Organization document noted how pre-war Damascus “had one of the best-developed healthcare systems in the Arab world.”

Not only that, but per a 2018 UN investigation, “universal, free healthcare” was extended to all Syrian citizens, who “enjoyed some of the highest levels of care in the region.” Education was likewise free, and before the conflict, “an estimated 97% of primary school-aged Syrian children were attending class and Syria’s literacy rates were thought to be at over 90% for both men and women [emphasis added].” By 2016, millions were out of school.

A UN Human Rights Council report two years later noted prior to 2011, Syria “was the only country in the Middle East region to be self-sufficient in food production,” its “thriving agricultural sector” contributing “about 21%” to GDP 2006 - 2011. Civilians’ daily caloric intake “was on par with many Western countries,” with prices kept affordable via state subsidy. Meanwhile, the country’s economy was “one of the best performing in the region, with a growth rate averaging 4.6%” annually.

At the time that report was written, Damascus had been reduced to heavy reliance on imports by Western sanctions in many sectors, and even then was barely able to buy or sell much in the way of anything, as the measures amounted to an effective embargo. Simultaneously, US military occupation of a resource-rich third of Syria cut off the government’s access to its own oil reserves and wheat. The situation only worsened with the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act’s passing in June 2020.

Under its auspices, a vast volume of goods and services in every conceivable field were and today remain banned from being sold to or traded with any Syrian citizen or entity. The legislation’s terms explicitly state preventing attempts to rebuild Syria was its chief objective. One passage openly outlines “a strategy to deter foreign persons from entering into contracts related to reconstruction.”

Immediately after coming into effect, the Syrian pound’s value collapsed yet further, sending living costs skyrocketing. In a blink, almost the entire country’s population was left barely able to afford basic essentials, absolutely fundamental to existence. Even mainstream sources typically approving of belligerence towards Damascus cautioned of an inevitably impending humanitarian crisis. However, Washington was neither concerned nor deterred by such warnings. In fact James Jeffrey, State Department chief of Syria policy, actively cheered these developments.

Simultaneously, as Jeffrey subsequently admitted to PBS, the US was engaged in frequent, secret communication with HTS, and actively assisting the group - albeit “indirectly”, due to the faction’s State Department designation as a terrorist entity. This followed covert approaches to Washington by its leaders, including Abu Mohammed Jolani, former leader of Al Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra. HTS reportedly pleaded:

“We want to be your friend. We’re not terrorists. We’re just fighting Assad.”

Given this contact, it may be no coincidence that in July 2022, Jolani issued a series of communications about HTS’ plans for future Syria, in which finance and industry loomed large. Directly foreshadowing the group’s recent pledge to “adopt a free-market model,” the extremist mass murderer discussed his desire to “open up local markets to the global economy.” Many passages read as if they were authored by representatives of the International Monetary Fund, and/or US State Department.

Jolani elucidates his vision for post-Assad Syria

Coincidentally, Syria since 1984 has refused IMF loans, a key tool by which the Empire maintains the global capitalist system and dominates the Global South, ensuring ‘poor’ countries remain wedged under its heel. The World Trade Organization, of which Damascus isn’t a member either, plays a similar role. Accession to both would go some way to cementing the “free-market model” advocated by HTS. And after over a decade of deliberate, systematic economic ruin, they have little other choice.

‘Shock Therapy’

In Syria’s protracted political and economic dismantling, there are eerie echoes of the Empire’s destruction of Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s. During that decade, the multiethnic socialist federation’s breakup produced bitter wars of independence in Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia - encouraged, financed, armed, and prolonged every step by Western powers. Belgrade’s purported centrality to these brutal conflicts led the UN Security Council to impose sanctions against what remained of the country in May 1992.

The measures were the harshest ever levied in UN history. At one point producing inflation of 5.578 quintillion percent, drug abuse, alcoholism, preventable deaths and suicides skyrocketed, while shortages of goods - including water - were perpetual. Yugoslavia’s once thriving independent industry was crippled, its ability to manufacture even everyday medicines virtually non-existent. By February 1993, the CIA assessed average citizens had “become accustomed to periodical shortages, long lines in stores, cold homes in the winter and restrictions on electricity.”

Surveying the wreckage years later, US Empire house journal Foreign Affairs noted the sanctions against Yugoslavia demonstrated how “in a matter of months or years whole economies can be devastated,” and such measures can serve as uniquely lethal “weapons of mass destruction” against civilian populations of target countries. Yet, despite such desolation and misery, throughout this period Belgrade remained resistant to privatisation, foreign ownership of its industry or pillaging of its vast resources. The overwhelming majority of Yugoslavia’s economy was state- or worker-owned.

Crucially, ala Syria, Yugoslavia was not a member of the IMF, World Bank, or WTO, which went some way to insulating the country from Western economic predation. In 1998 though, authorities began waging a heavy-handed counterinsurgency against the Kosovo Liberation Army, a CIA- and MI6-funded and armed Al Qaeda-linked extremist militia. This provided the Empire with a pretext to at last finish the job of neutralising what remained of the country’s socialist system, via NATO bombing. As a Clinton administration official later admitted:

“It was Yugoslavia’s resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform [in Eastern Europe] - not the plight of Kosovar Albanians - that best explains NATO’s war.”

From March - June 1999, the military alliance bombed Yugoslavia for 78 straight days. Yet, Belgrade’s army was barely in the firing line at any stage. In all, officially just 14 Yugoslav tanks were destroyed by NATO, but 372 separate industrial facilities got smashed to smithereens, leaving hundreds of thousands jobless. Markedly, the alliance took guidance from US corporations on which sites to target, and not a single foreign- or privately-owned factory was hit.

Wreckage of NATO bombing in Belgrade, 1999

NATO’s assault laid foundations for Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic’s removal via a CIA- and National Endowment for Democracy-sponsored colour revolution in October the next year. In his place, a doggedly pro-Western government advised by a collective of US-sponsored free market idealists took power. Their explicit mission was to “make an economic environment favorable for private and other investments” in Belgrade. Ravaging “shock therapy” measures were deployed the moment they assumed office, to the further detriment of an already immiserated and impoverished population.

In the decades since, successive EU and US-backed governments across the former Yugoslavia have enforced an endless array of neoliberal “reforms”, in order to ensure an “investor-friendly” environment locally for wealthy Western oligarchs and corporations. In lockstep, low wages and lacking employment opportunities regionally stubbornly endure or worsen, while living costs constantly rise, producing mass depopulation, among other destructive effects. All along too, US officials intimately implicated in the country’s breakup have brazenly sought to personally enrich themselves from privatisation of Yugoslavia’s former state- and worker-owned industries.

Does such a fate await Damascus? For Alexander McKay, the answer is a resounding “yes”. Now “free”, Syria will be forcedly made “dependent upon imports from the West” evermore. This not only fattens the Empire’s bottom line, but “severely restricts the freedom of any Syrian government to act with any degree of independence.” He notes similar efforts were undertaken worldwide throughout the post-1989 era of US unipolarity. This was well underway in Russia during the 1990s, “until a turnaround started under Putin, post-2000”:

“The aim is to reduce Syria to the same status as Lebanon, with an economy controlled by imperial forces, an army used primarily for internal repression, and an economy no longer able to produce anything but merely serve as a market for commodities produced elsewhere, and site of resource extraction. The US and its allies do not want independent development of any nation’s economy. We must hope the Syrian people can resist this latest act of neo-colonialism.”