Alarm Raised In Iran As Exports To Syria Shrink By 50%
Despite tens of billions of dollars Iran spent in Syria to save Bashar al-Assad's regime from being overrun by rebels, its exports to the Arab country have dwindled to negligible levels.
Despite tens of billions of dollars Iran spent in Syria to save Bashar al-Assad's regime from being overrun by rebels, its exports to the Arab country have dwindled to negligible levels.
Abdolamir Rabihavi, Director General of Iran’s Trade Promotion Organization for Western Asia, said Iran’s exports to Syria have plummeted by 50 percent to just $120 million annually.
Iran’s exports to Syria were $244 million in the previous Iranian calendar year (March 2022 to March 2023) but the figure has decreased to $120 million this year, reported Rabihavi in a video released by Navad-e Eqtesadi Telegram channel on Saturday.
This is far below the expected level of economic cooperation between the two allied countries, he stressed.
His remarks came a week after Hassan Shah Hosseini, head of the Syria Desk at Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, warned that Tehran’s 100-million-dollar exports to Damascus is “very insignificant.” He urged Iranian merchants “to find their own ways to trade with Syria.”
Referring to the shrinking trade volume, Hossein-Ali Haji-Deligani, a former high-ranking Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) officer and hardline lawmaker, said in a critical tone in September 2023: “Despite our support for the Syrian government, we have little to contribute to the reconstruction of Syria today.”
“The countries that were the main causes of the war in Syria are now leading its reconstruction,” he claimed, probably referring to Turkey.
This is while Iranian officials have repeatedly emphasized that Tehran’s expenditures in Syria since 2011 should be compensated via bilateral economic cooperation. Iran entered the Syrian civil war more than a decade ago dispatching thousands of fighters and even its own Revolutionary Guard forces to fight anti-Assad insurgents.
Trying to justify the high cost of involvement in the Syrian war, the IRGC, in particular, has been arguing over the past years that trade and investment in Syria will pay off and compensate for the billions of dollars Tehran has spent to support Bashar al-Assad.
Six years ago, Yahya Rahim Safavi, special military advisor to the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, remarked that Iran should “recoup” the expenses it has incurred in Syria through the latter’s “oil, gas and phosphate mines.”
However, reports indicate that a large part of Tehran-Damascus economic agreements have fallen short of realization.
In December 2022, Mehr news agency, close to Iran’s hardliners, confirmed that Iran has “lagged behind” in taking advantage of potential trade Syria could offer, particularly in terms of exporting goods and engineering services to the country.
“None of the clauses of the major agreements between the two countries’ political leaders have resulted in any economic benefit,” Mehr wrote at that time. It also noted that Iran was to build 200,000 housing units in Syria, but this project never came to fruition.
According to a leaked document revealed in May 2023 by the hacktivist group ‘Uprising till Overthrow', affiliated with the Albania-based opposition Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), Syria owes Iran $50 billion, a combination of aid in the form of military support and cash.
It is also estimated that Iran provided Assad’s regime with roughly $11 billion worth of oil from 2012 to 2021.
In May 2020 a member of the Iranian parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh, made an unprecedented declaration that Iran has spent $30 billion in Syria and must recoup the loss.
Israel’s Alma, an institute focused on threats to northern Israel, revealed in 2023 that Iran’s investment into weapons plants in Syria continues, at the expense of the Iranian people suffering the worst economic crisis in decades.
For the first time in his political career, Khatami not only refrained from voting in the parliament and Assembly of Experts elections, despite Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's repeated declarations that voting is a religious duty, but also defended his decision as a stance in solidarity with the majority of Iranians discontent with the country's governance, in a speech to his advisors on Wednesday.
While many reformists praise him as "a winner" for boycotting Iran's "stage-managed" elections, he faces strong criticism from other political factions and social media users, both within the regime and among dissidents, who accuse him of hypocrisy and opportunism.
In a note on Wednesday, the ultra-hardline Kayhan newspaper, whose chief editor Hossein Shariatmadari is an appointee of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, accused him and other abstaining reformists, such as the Etehad-e Mellat (Nation’s Unity) party, of complicity with the “known enemies of the regime”.
“Refusing to participate in the elections is the officially announced instruction of America and Israel. Is it not? So why are you selling your open complicity and collaboration with America and Israel as moving together with the people?” Kayhan wrote.
Khatami's election abstention, however, appears to have reinvigorated reformists who view his action as a significant step forward with the potential to reconcile with Iranians who have been disillusioned with reformists over the past decade.
Protesters in the past few years often chanted not only against hardliners but also against reformists who they saw as part of the system.
Khatami stated that he abstained from voting in solidarity with the many dissatisfied people who believe that "correcting/reforming" the current trajectory of affairs is the only way to salvage the country.
To him, not voting in the current adverse circumstances is another form of voting, and he hopes that his abstention can help restore people's "damaged trust" in the government and political currents, including reformists.
He argued that the country's urgent need is to restore social capital and "settle differences" between the government and people to "save the country from threats and crises," emphasizing that the ruling system has a greater responsibility in reforming its structure, approach, and behavior.
Khatami has faced criticism for his "historical delay" in refusing to participate in the elections managed by Khamenei and his appointees in the Guardian Council, as well as for not officially articulating his departure from "political Islam."
The political act of abstention by Khatami and his supporters can only be taken seriously when they officially denounce political Islam in every shape and form and admit that all people are equal irrespective of their backgrounds, thinking, and lifestyle, one of his critics argued in an article by Ehsan Rastgar published by Zeitoon news website Wednesday.
“As long as it is devoted to political Islam, this school of thought [to which Khatami and his supporters belong] is not different in essence and its overall approach from Shia fundamentalism and people like the leader of the Islamic Republic,” he wrote.
Once an advocate of “religious democracy,” Khatami referred to “developmental democracy” as the ideal form of governance in his speech and seemed to be endorsing secularism in governance.
The use of the term “developmental democracy” has baffled many who expected him to offer a more straightforward and clear definition of the form of governance he is proposing.
“Developmental democracy” is a notion proposed by Richard L. Sklar, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of California in a book of the same name in which he said developmental democracy is the best form of democracy for African countries.
According to his own website, Sklar’s developmental democracy posits a causal relationship between democratic practice and economic development.
This form of democracy has also been interpreted as one that gives priority to cultivating the development of individual abilities and holds that the estimation of democracy lies in its commitment to national and individual improvement.