Cash crunch leaves Syrians queueing for hours to collect salaries
DAMASCUS: Seated on the pavement outside a bank in central Damascus, Abu Fares's face is worn with exhaustion as he waits to collect a small portion of his pension.'I've been here for four hours and I haven't so much as touched my pension,' said the 77-year-old, who did not wish to give his full name.'The cash dispensers are under-stocked and the queues are long,' he continued.Since the overthrow of president Bashar Assad last December, Syria has been struggling to emerge from the wake of nearly 14 years of civil war, and its banking sector is no exception.Decades of punishing sanctions imposed on the Assad dynasty – which the new authorities are seeking to have lifted – have left about 90 percent of Syrians under the poverty line, according to the United Nations.The liquidity crisis has forced authorities to drastically limit cash withdrawals, leaving much of the population struggling to make ends meet.Prior to his ousting, Assad's key ally Russia held a monopoly on printing banknotes. The new authorities have only announced once that they have received a shipment of banknotes from Moscow since Assad's overthrow.In a country with about 1.25 million public sector employees, civil servants must queue at one of two state banks or affiliated ATMs to make withdrawals, capped at about 200,000 Syrian pounds, the equivalent on the black market of $20 per day.In some cases, they have to take a day off just to wait for the cash.'There are sick people, elderly... we can't continue like this,' said Abu Fares.'There is a clear lack of cash, and for that reason we deactivate the ATMs at the end of the workday,' an employee at a private bank said, preferring not to give her name.A haphazard queue of about 300 people stretches outside the Commercial Bank of Syria. Some are sitting on the ground.Afraa Jumaa, a civil servant, said she spends most of the money she withdraws on the travel fare to get to and from the bank.'The conditions are difficult and we need to withdraw our salaries as quickly as possible,' said the 43-year-old.'It's not acceptable that we have to spend days to withdraw meagre sums.'The local currency has plunged in value since the civil war erupted in 2011, prior to which the dollar was valued at 50 pounds.Economist Georges Khouzam explained that foreign exchange vendors – whose work was outlawed under Assad – 'deliberately reduced cash flows in Syrian pounds to provoke rapid fluctuations in the market and turn a profit.'Muntaha Abbas, a 37-year-old civil servant, had to return three times to withdraw her entire salary of 500,000 pounds.'There are a lot of ATMs in Damascus, but very few of them work,' she said.After a five-hour wait, she was finally able to withdraw 200,000 pounds.'Queues and more queues... our lives have become a series of queues,' she lamented.
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Asharq Al-Awsat
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With these strains came stricter measures: the Syria Accountability and Lebanon Sovereignty Act of 2003, enforced by OFAC at the US Treasury in 2004 under Executive Order 13338, targeted Syria's role in Lebanon and its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, as well as its opposition to the US-led occupation of Iraq. On May 7, 2025, the Trump administration signed a notice extending the national emergency concerning Syria until May 7, 2026, encompassing executive orders from 2003 to 2012. The Syrian uprising and Caesar Act Following Syria's uprising in March 2011, the US imposed a wave of sanctions targeting violence and human rights abuses. President Barack Obama's April 29, 2011 executive order froze Assad regime assets, followed by an August 2011 ban on oil, asset freezes, and broad trade prohibitions, excluding food and medicine. However, the defining moment came with the Caesar Civilian Protection Act of 2019, signed by Trump in December 2019 and implemented in June 2020. 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