Reports | 25 05 2020
By: Hanadi Zahlout
The latest news coming from Lattakia confirm that the regime now bargains with cafes in the city, demanding them for fines in return for its elements not storming them. The customers of a cafe that coughs up this amount will remain safe, with the cafe becoming safe haven for such youth. Any cafe refusing to pay up, will be deserted and declare bankruptcy after forcible entry by regime elements ostensibly seeking to drag young men into its army.
The financial Tashbeeh [thuggery] system has been quite inventive, coming up with a variety of methods to plunder Syrians—whether regime supporters or not.
The regime that has become so rife with corruption, that it has become a given to pay a bribe in any of its agencies to complete any transaction; has further tightened its grip on its functionaries. Their salaries barely sustain their children, thereby opening the door to blindly overlooking rampant corruption.
Before the Revolution in Syria, the President’s wealth reportedly reached one hundred twenty billion dollars—thereby competing with many other corrupt rulers. Bashar al-Assad's wife continued her online shopping sprees and lavish birthday parties for her children; caring little about the fact that entire schools, hospitals, and buildings collapsed over the heads of women, children, and elderly; or that ten million Syrians became homeless, and entire families were buried. The concentration of wealth, however, continued in the al-Assad and Makhlouf clans, as well as those around them—traders in blood and crises.
Between one death and another, the regime raised the amount for the Badal [payment in lieu of military service] amount from six thousand five hundred to fifteen thousand [dollars] in 2013; to reduce it once again in 2015 to reduce. The insistence, however, is on payment in foreign currency, with the clear hoping of securing foreign exchange—at any price.
Many of the young men called for their [military] service have either been killed; preferred to pay the Badal amount in cash; or paid bribes to have their conscription deferred. Those of them who managed to flee, were forced to renew their passports and, therefore, forced to pay the Badal. Otherwise, they would have to forfeit seeing their country again indefinitely, as a minimum risk.
The homes and furniture of many of the neighborhoods abandoned by their inhabitants to escape the ongoing massacres, have been looted. Nor have roofs or machinery been spared—all of which were publicly peddled in the “burglars’” markets which the regime Shabeeha [thugs] have revived, today, what have been renamed under the supposedly-secular Assad regime as the Sunna markets!
In a related—and deliberately unreported—incident, several aluminum traders in Tartous refused to buy stolen trucks; and were, therefore, subjected to persecution by security services.
Security branches, in turn, as well. Prisons offer vast opportunities to extort detainees’ families; amounts running into the millions of Syrian Pounds paid only to find out where a detainee is, or if he were dead or alive.
Release on bail, or even being transferred from one security branch to another or from one branch to a regular prison now requires larger amounts. Extortion, of course, even extends to prisoner visits, and does not end with stealing prisoners’ personal effects.
The regime has additionally issued an explicit decision to transfer all monies confiscated via the terrorism court to its treasury.
Whereas prices in regime areas rose unabated, the regime started to impose special price rates for foreign exchanges and money transfers. Money is transported under the permanent presence of the security elements stationed at exchange offices. The Asad regime’s authority-monetary guillotine now holds an even tighter—almost indescribable—grip onto the necks of Syrians in regime areas. Residents of besieged areas, on the other hands, languish under regime barrels. They are cornered between the shells and the famine—a famine to which our people have not grown accustomed, despite years of siege, scarcity of materials, and an unprecedented rise in prices.
Frequent kidnappings have thrust us into a naked mafia state. People disappear in broad daylight, with the story always the same; a security patrol passes by, takes whomever they may please. The surprise is that a “gang” then contacts the family, demanding ransom in the tens of millions of [Syrian] pounds!
There are today in Syria tens if not hundreds of families that have coughed up large sums of money to receive the body of their son, to give it a decent burial. The regime seems intent on killing us, and on desecrating both our cadavers and our humanity at once.
* Opinion pieces do not necessarily express the views of Rozana Media.