Syria: Failed state or narco-state?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 19 May 2021
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How ten years of conflict have destroyed the country's economy. As Syria prepares for largely symbolic elections to re-elect its President Bashar Al-Assad next week, we look at how ten years of conflict have destroyed the country's economy. Ed Butler looks at the growing evidence that Syria's government is now building its income around a multi-billion dollar trade in narcotics. He speaks to Syrian economist Jihad Yazigi, editor in chief of the online publication The Syria Report, Martin Chulov, The Guardian newspapers' Middle East editor and to Elizabeth Tsurkov, a fellow at the New Lines institute in Washington specialising in the Levant. (Picture credit: A member of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) walks through the debris in the old city centre on the eastern frontline of Raqa on September 25, 2017)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi there, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:05.2 | Today, Syria's drug problem, a regime that's allegedly supplying amphetamins across the Middle East. |
| 0:12.8 | It is big and it is growing and it is starting to rival the crumbling Syrian economy. |
| 0:18.3 | Revenues of around $3.5 to $4 billion per year are estimated to be what the |
| 0:24.0 | Capitagon industry may now be worth. Meanwhile, ordinary Syrians are increasingly going hungry |
| 0:30.1 | amidst a growing economic crisis. Is there any real prospect for change in Syria? This is a regime |
| 0:37.0 | that is willing to let its population starve |
| 0:39.8 | without carrying out any reforms that are needed. Syria, a failed state, or is it a drug state? Business |
| 0:47.6 | daily from the BBC. That's audio from one of a growing number of sporadic anti-government protests last year that took place in Syria. |
| 1:04.4 | Even in loyalist areas, there's a growing sense of desperation about the government. |
| 1:10.2 | My name is. a growing sense of desperation about the government. |
| 1:16.6 | My name is Bilal and I'm from Damascus. I left the city in 2017, but many of our relatives and families remain in those regime-controlled areas. |
| 1:23.6 | Now their living conditions are very bad from hunger and extreme poverty. |
| 1:28.6 | The government is unable to solve this problem. |
| 1:31.1 | It has no solutions. |
| 1:34.8 | This man is one of thousands of migrants who've now settled in Idlib. |
| 1:39.4 | It's the last rebel-held city in Syria. |
| 1:42.4 | Some of these people fled government areas for political reasons, |
| 1:45.9 | but many simply for want of food. |
| 1:52.7 | My name is Salama Muhammad. I have relatives outside of Damascus. They suffer from |
| 1:57.9 | severe poverty, lack of job opportunities, low incomes and the collapse of the currency. |
| 2:04.3 | Most people depend on foreign remittances from their relatives outside of Syria, and some are forced to sell their property just to survive. |
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