At some point this kind of thing will slip to Page 3: Non-WoT, but it seems to me that at this stage the HTS conquest is still solidifying control. It will be interesting to see how totalitarian this polished Al Qaeda group chooses its caliphate to be the next several years — more like Kemalist Turkey, like the Mullahcracy of Iran or Wahabbi Saudi Arabia, or as nasty as the ISIS caliphate?
[IsraelTimes] Size of delivery, the second since Ahmed al-Sharaa came into power, is unclear; Moscow seeking to maintain influence in Damascus after backing ousted leader Assad during civil warSyria began paying Russia to print its currency under a multi-million dollar contract during the 13-year-old Syrian civil war, after Damascus’s previous contract with a subsidiary of the Austrian central bank was terminated due to European sanctions.
It is unclear if the arrangement is now continuing under the same terms. One source familiar with the contract said it was.
Russia supported Syrian autocrat Bashir
Pencilneckal-Assad
Oppressor of the Syrians and the Lebs...
during the war, swaying the conflict with its bombardment of rebels, including the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, formerly al-Nusra, before that it was called something else
...al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, from which sprang the Islamic State..., which ousted Assad in a lightning offensive last year.
But Russia quickly moved to maintain its ties with Damascus in the weeks after Assad fled to Moscow, with an eye on keeping its two key bases in the country’s coastal region.
A senior Russian diplomat visited Damascus in January, and Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa held a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin
...President-for-Life of Russia. He gets along well with other presidents for life. He is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law, which occasionally results in somebody dropping dead from poisoning by polonium or other interesting substance. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to him. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile or dead from poisoning by polonium or other interesting substances...
on February 12.
Two days later, Syria received its first shipment of local currency from Russia.
The cash shipments are critical: Syria’s war-ravaged economy has slid further in the past months amid a shortage of currency that Syrian officials have attributed in part to delays in the Russian cash shipments, as well as to hoarding of Syrian pounds.
A senior former Syrian official said Russian cash shipments in the hundreds of billions of Syrian pounds (tens of millions of US dollars) used to arrive in Damascus each month. Rooters could not determine exactly how much had arrived on Wednesday, the second such shipment since Assad was ousted on December 8.
The cash crunch has left Syrian depositors struggling to use their savings and has piled pressure on local businesses who are already being squeezed by new competition from cheap imports as the protectionist economy is opened up by the new rulers.
Adding to the economic malaise, a planned 400 percent public-sector salary increase has not materialized, and neither has the Qatar
...an emirate on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It sits on some really productive gas and oil deposits, which produces the highest per capita income in the world. They piss it all away on religion, financing the Moslem Brotherhood and several al-Qaeda affiliates. Home of nutbag holy manYusuf al-Qaradawi...
i finance underpinning that increase, sources told Rooters, attributing the issue to ambiguity surrounding US sanctions and US President Donald Trump
...Never got invited to a P.Diddy party...
’s Syria policy.
Economists and analysts say Syria’s cash shortage is largely behind the currency’s strengthening on the black market in the months since Assad fell, while it has also been helped by an influx of visitors from abroad and an end to strict controls on trade in foreign currencies.
The pound on Thursday was trading at around 10,000 per greenback on the black market, compared to the official central bank rate of 13,000.
It traded at around 15,000 per US dollar before Assad was toppled.
Syrian central bank governor Maysaa Sabreen told Rooters in January that she wanted to avoid printing Syrian pounds to guard against inflation.
The central bank only has foreign exchange reserves of around $200 million in cash, sources previously told Rooters, a huge drop from the $18.5 billion that the International Monetary Fund estimated Syria had in 2010, a year before the civil war erupted.
The bank also holds nearly 26 tons of gold, the same amount it held before the war, the sources said.