There is a story about the occupied West Bank that gets remarkably little attention: water.

With the news this week that settlers have taken control of a pipeline that was used to irrigate crops in the West Bank village of Fasayil in the Jordan Valley and diverted it to create a splashing pool for their community, I wanted to go over the crucial but underreported topic of the control over water supply of water and why Palestinians and Israeli settlers living in the same territory have such radically different access to it.

“The allocation of water is very unequal,” human rights lawyer Sari Bashi tells me. “Settlements are allocated very large amounts of water, including for agriculture, swimming pools and certainly for daily use, while Palestinians are allocated much less.”

For Israelis in illegal settlements, water can flow reliably from the tap, 24 hours a day. For Palestinians living only a few kilometres away, chronic shortages can mean storing water in tanks on rooftops, buying it from private tankers or rationing supplies during the summer.

According to figures compiled by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, Israelis, including those living in settlements in the West Bank, consumed an average of 247 litres of water per person per day in 2020. Palestinians in the West Bank consumed an average of just 82.4 litres.

In Palestinian communities that are not connected to the water network, consumption can fall to just 26 litres per person per day, roughly the level found in disaster zones.

B’Tselem found that, in total, Israelis consumed around ten times as much water as Palestinians in the West Bank in 2020, even though the Israeli population was only around three times larger.

So why is there such a dramatic difference?

Israel says the West Bank faces a water shortage and has blamed the Palestinian Authority for mismanaging the territory’s water resources.

But the history of who controls the water tells a much more complicated story.

When Israel captured the West Bank in 1967, it also took control of the territory’s water resources. Palestinian communities were required to obtain Israeli approval to drill new wells, while Israel expanded its access to major water sources, particularly in the Jordan Valley.

The restrictions placed on Palestinian water development became part of a broader system of Israeli control over the West Bank’s water infrastructure.

That system continued under the 1995 Oslo II agreement, which was originally intended to be an interim arrangement lasting five years. But more than three decades later, key aspects of its water provisions remain in place.

Under Oslo II, approximately 80 percent of the water extracted from the Mountain Aquifer, a shared groundwater resource beneath Israel and the West Bank, was allocated for Israeli use, with roughly 20 percent allocated for the Palestinians.

Palestinians were restricted to specified quantities from existing wells and to additional amounts that required the development of new wells and other projects. Israel, meanwhile, retained control over the approval of Palestinian water infrastructure and remained the dominant consumer of the shared resource.

For a Palestinian population that has grown substantially since Oslo, those arrangements have become increasingly difficult to sustain.

The Palestinian Authority has consequently had to purchase increasing amounts of water from Mekorot, Israel’s national water company, to make up for the shortfall.

In addition, much of the Palestinian water network is old and poorly maintained. Around one-third of the water purchased by the Palestinian Authority is estimated to be lost through leaks before it reaches consumers.

Israeli authorities blame the Palestinian Authority for not maintaining the water distribution networks in the occupied West Bank even though repairing and upgrading that infrastructure requires Israeli approval because many pipelines and other projects pass through Area C, the roughly 60 percent of the West Bank that remains under full Israeli civil and security control.

The result is a system in which Palestinian communities can face restrictions not only on the amount of water they can access, but also on their ability to repair the infrastructure needed to deliver it.

The problem becomes particularly acute during the summer.

As temperatures rise and demand increases, Mekorot has at times reduced supplies to Palestinian communities while demand rises in Israeli settlements. Palestinians can find themselves with less water precisely when they need more of it.

And then there are the communities that are not connected to the water network at all.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has reported that more than 70 percent of communities located entirely or mostly in Area C are not connected to the water network and instead rely on water delivered by tanker, which is typically vastly more expensive than piped water.

In parts of the South Hebron Hills, Palestinian villages such as At-Tuwani and surrounding herding communities remain disconnected from the regional water network even as Israeli water infrastructure runs through or near their land to supply nearby settlements.

Local communities have repeatedly sought permission to build pipelines connecting homes and to construct rainwater-harvesting systems. Many of those requests have been rejected.

For Palestinians living in these communities, the consequences are tangible. Water has to be purchased, transported and stored. The cost can rise further because many of these communities lack proper roads, making tanker deliveries more difficult and expensive.

But because Israeli settlements in the West Bank are connected to Israel’s water infrastructure, rooftop water tanks that are ubiquitous in Palestinian communities, are absent from settlement landscapes.

B’Tselem found that 92 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank store water in rooftop tanks due to unreliable supply.

The water supply issue for Palestinian communities has become even more acute since October 7^th, 2023 as Israeli authorities have targeted existing structures on Palestinian land, according to the United Nations. OCHA has tracked the dismantling or confiscation of more than 100 Palestinian sanitation and hygiene structures between 2023 and early 2026 because they had been built or repaired without the required permits.

I have contacted the Israeli water authorities for a response to the figures and allegations outlined here, including the claims concerning water allocation, supply reductions and restrictions on Palestinian water infrastructure. At the time of publication, I had not received a response. If a response is received, I will update this piece accordingly.

Photo: Guillaume Paumier / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.

Lebanon finds itself once again as one of the flashpoints of a wider regional war, this time involving Iran, Israel and the United States.

After the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran February 28th, it appeared as though Iran-backed Hezbollah was staying out of the battle. Instead, it launched attacks on Israel a few days later.

The consequences have been catastrophic: entire villages reduced to rubble, critical infrastructure destroyed, and an Israeli military presence that increasingly appears to be a long-term occupation.

Joining me today is Al Monitor's Editor-in-Chief, Joyce Karam, to discuss what lies ahead for Lebanon, and how much influence the country's weak central government really has over its own future.

The last time the world saw Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya in Gaza was in a grainy video filmed from an upper floor of Kamal Adwan Hospital. I remember pausing and replaying the footage: a lone figure in a white doctor’s coat making his way through an apocalyptic landscape of rubble and twisted metal, walking toward a waiting Israeli tank.

By then, months of Israeli attacks had reduced much of the hospital complex to ruins.

I was working on an NBC News report about Israel’s detention of Abu Safiya, the renowned paediatrician and director of Kamal Adwan, then the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza.

It was December 27, 2024.

“Doctor, how are you? Everything ok?” one of the soldiers asked him in Arabic, shaking his hand as he willingly entered the tank. He’d been seen earlier answering the questions of Israeli forces that had ordered the evacuation of the hospital which involved moving the last remaining patients, some still hooked up to IV’s and in their beds, to facilities farther South. He had remained inside the facility throughout an 85-day siege by the Israeli military.

The soldier questioning him spoke in heavily accented Arabic.

“Is anyone still inside?”

“There is no one left inside,” Abu Safiya replied.

Israeli forces are believed to have taken Dr

. Abu Safiya first to the Sde Teiman military base after forcing the remaining hospital staff to strip and march hands up outside the medical complex.

The images of physicians and nurses in their underwear added an additional dimension to the scenes of complete Israeli domination of the facility and its workers. These wouldn’t just be arrests and detentions, they would become scenes of public humiliation. The doctors, made to remove all remaining identifiers of their roles as caregivers, were force-marched to an unknown fate at the barrel of a tank. Many would be detained and some, like Dr. Abu Safiya, are still in Israeli prisons.

In various social media posts at the time, the Israeli government alleged that Dr. Abu Safiya was a Hamas member and that Kamal Adwan Hospital was used as a Hamas control center. Authorities did not provide evidence of these claims and did not share any of the intelligence used to justify their decision to hold him under administrative detention.

The system of administrative detention, primarily designed to jail Palestinians on terrorism or terror-related charges, is used routinely in Israel. According to Israeli Human Rights organization B’Tselem, the Israel Prison Service was holding 3,329 Palestinians in administrative detention as of December 2025.

***

Today, Dr. Abu Safiya is himself casting doubt on his ability to survive his detention.

Following his most recent prison visit on 2 July, his lawyer, Nasser Odeh, described a man so physically depleted that he initially struggled to recognise him. According to Odeh, Dr. Abu Safiya had fresh injuries to his head, eyes, ears, and neck. He was struggling to breathe, too weak to remain seated without falling, and repeatedly appeared on the verge of losing consciousness.

“This is the last time you will see me,” Dr. Abu Safiya said, according to his lawyer. “They brought me here to kill me. I don’t see myself surviving.”

We saw a brief glimpse of the doctor during his June 10^th, 2026 appearance via video link before Israel’s Supreme Court as his lawyer was appealing his detention. It was his first public sighting in 16 months since being detained without charge. Dr. Abu Safiya looked extremely frail, gaunt, and significantly emaciated and in the few seconds that the screen was visible to journalists in the courtroom, his arms appeared to show signs of bruising, lashes and a skin infection.

His lawyer later said that after that, four to five guards entered his cell where he was being held in solitary confinement and “using a hammer, beat him all over his body.”

His surviving son, who has been advocating for his father’s release from day one, posted a video today, one of dozens he has uploaded to social media since his father’s detention.

This time, in addition to pleading for his Dr Abu Safiya’s release, he directed blame squarely at Muslim and Arab countries, that, he said, had remained shamefully silent as Israel has continued to target his father and other healthcare workers.

“You ignored my father’s cries when he pleaded with you,” he says in the reel. “Your silence is a betrayal.”

Physicians for Human Rights Israel warned that Abu Safiya’s life is in immediate danger after his transfer to the Rakefet section of Nitzan prison and is demanding his release, as are several human rights organizations and the United Nations.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has cited Palestinian Ministry of Health figures reporting that 1,722 healthcare workers have been killed in Gaza.

Hundreds of Palestinians, including healthcare workers, have been detained during Israel’s assault on Gaza, with many subjected to enforced disappearance and allegations of torture and other ill-treatment.

Doctors including Dr. Iyad al-Rantisi and Dr. Adnan al-Bursh died in Israeli custody. Across Gaza, hospitals have been repeatedly struck and the healthcare system devastated, despite their protected status under international law.

If Dr. Abu Safiya dies in detention, it will read like a chronicle of a death long foretold.

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In asymmetric warfare, the cheapest weapons often put the most pressure on a militarily superior enemy.

In the case of Hezbollah vs Israel, inexpensive drones have been used with increasing efficiency, altering some of the traditional battlefield dynamics in a conflict that has continued despite ceasefire announcements.

Fourteen Israeli soldiers have been killed in Lebanon since the first ceasefire between the two sides was announced April 16^th, many in so-called First Person View (FPV) drone attacks.

Unlike conventional drones, these systems are manually piloted via fibre-optic cables rather than radio signals, making them immune to electronic jamming. They are therefore difficult to detect or disable before they hit their targets.

“Hezbollah has transformed cheap commercial quadcopters into precision-guided munitions, which has ended some of Israel’s traditional advantages and how it conducts ground manoeuvres or protects its assets,” retired Lebanese Brigadier General Takkiedine El-Tannir tells me.

Read more

In this episode, we get very candid about why we left a big jobs in mainstream media: I wanted to get back into field journalism and Arwa decided to dedicate herself entirely to her amazing charity, INARA.

(With a special guest appearance by Louis the Cavalier!)

The international conversation has paid remarkably little attention to Israel’s ongoing occupation and repeated incursions into Syria.

Israel’s new Syria plan started shortly after a lightning rebel advance, led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, reached Damascus on December 8^th, 2024. Within hours, the IDF had invaded the demilitarized territory separating Syria from the occupied Golan Heights, in violation of a 1974 Disengagement agreement designed to establish a neutral zone separating the two countries.

In addition to its incursions, Israel has repeatedly struck Syria’s Air Force, its navy and heavy weaponry installations with the aim of neutering Syria militarily and reinforcing Israeli dominance over the territories it controls. In the year after the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime, Israel had conducted at least 600 strikes on Syria, resulting in exactly zero retaliatory strikes by Syria.

To be clear, the new Syrian leaders don’t have much leverage. They are ruling over an economically broken country that has endured years of war, corruption and punishing sanctions.

“The Syrians are betting a lot on the Americans,” Ibrahim Hamidi, editor in chief of Al Majalla magazine tells me. “The new leaders said we have no interest in waging war and we would like to address this new occupied territory by diplomatic means.”

But those pleas have fallen on deaf ears. In the last 18 months, the IDF has set up military outposts and conducted repeated incursions deeper into Syrian territory, raising concerns that its occupation of large swaths of the country is becoming entrenched.

By mid-2025, satellite imagery reported by the Syrian Network for Human Rights “confirmed the presence of at least six military bases” inside the demilitarized zone occupied by the IDF. A recent Human Rights Watch report describes various abuses by Israeli forces against the local population, including forced displacement and home seizures and demolitions.

The Israeli military has also launched airstrikes against the Syrian military that it says are in defense of the Syrian Druze after clashes between Syrian government forces and the Druze population in Suweida. Those events marked a dark chapter in the new Syria with reports of civilian massacres but that Israel is accused of exploiting to further solidify its foothold into Syrian territory.

The Israeli Prime Minister’s statements and actions have further clarified his government’s intentions. In what Syria’s ambassador to the United Nations called a “provocative tour,” Benjamin Netanyahu visited parts of Syria occupied by his forces in November 2025, claiming the occupation there was “to ensure the security of Israeli citizens.”

He also demanded that Syria establish a “demilitarized buffer zone from Damascus to the buffer zone, including of course the approaches to Mount Hermon and the Hermon peak” within its own borders.

It’s unsurprising that Israel wants to keep control of the Hermon Peak, the highest point in Syria, once inside the demilitarized zone but now under IDF control. Netanyahu’s demands that Syria abandon all claims to control its own security are met with dismay inside the country but have so far not led to any significant pushback on the international stage.

Many people remember the November 2025 meeting between Syria’s interim president and U.S. President Donald Trump for an awkward Oval Office moment in which Ahmed al-Sharaa was sprayed with “Trump Cologne” by Trump himself. The exchange clearly left an impression on the American president, who later sent additional bottles with a note: “Just in case you ran out!”

The Syrian president later posted a message of thanks on X, writing in part: “Thank you, Mr. President @realDonaldTrump, for your generosity and for topping up this precious gift.”

But cologne was not top of the agenda for the visiting Syrian delegation.

“We know that when Ahmed al-Sharaa met with President Donald Trump November 10^th, 2025, he urged Trump to play a role with Netanyahu tell him to pull out from the territories occupied after the fall of the Assad regime. And Trump promised to help,” Ibrahim Hamidi told me.

So far, though, that help has not materialized. Israel’s occupation of the territory it now controls inside Syria has remained in place, despite the signing in January 2026 of an intelligence-sharing agreement between the two countries focused on de-escalation. In all, up to 400 square kilometers of land, which includes several new Israeli outposts and military checkpoints, remain under IDF control.

The worry among many Syrians is that Israel will not only remain, but quietly seek to annex the territories it now occupies. In the same way the part of the Golan Heights seized by Israel in 1967 was later unilaterally annexed in 1981.

Those fears may not be unfounded: in April, The Israeli government approved a $334 million, multi-year plan to expand settlements in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights. The project seeks to bring about 3,000 additional Israeli settler families to the area by 2030.

It was the largest covered souk in the world. More accurately, it was a labyrinth of souks, dozens of arteries flowing into one another under vaulted ceilings. Before my trip to Syria last week, the last time I had walked the medieval alleyways of Aleppo’s market was 2010. It was so vast and diverse that I could only find my way by using visual landmarks: turn left at the first gold market shop, keep walking - there is a café that serves fresh cherry juice on the way - walk past it and then continue another ten minutes through the rug section and the silver jewellery shop we like is there. First on the right.

The souk was its own city. It had its own rhythm, its smells, its beating heart. It was a living organism.

But during my tour, though large sections of the souk had been rebuilt and others were undergoing renovation work, my visual memory was useless. Seventy percent of the old medina market was destroyed in fierce battles between 2012 and 2016, according to the Aga Khan Foundation. A fire burned kilometers of stalls and shops in 2012, leaving a shell of charred stone. Even with the restored sections, the souk is a shadow of what it once was.

When visiting Aleppo for a week, I swung wildly between optimism and anguish. Optimism because there is rebuilding and most of the people I encountered told me they were relieved that the regime of Bashar al-Assad was gone for good. And then anguish standing before the ruins of millennia old UNESCO world heritage sites like the Mamluk-era hammam or the old Ottoman era Carlton hotel across from the medieval citadel, obliterated by tunnel bombs.

The heaviest destruction was concentrated southeast of the citadel, where some of Aleppo’s most historically significant landmarks were reduced to ruins. Among them were the Madrasa al-Sultaniyya, built in 1223, bombed out of existence. The 16^th century al-Adiliyya Mosque, and the al-Utrush Mosque, which had stood since the late 14^th century. Some of the city’s most important khans — the caravanserais that once anchored Aleppo’s commercial life — also suffered major damage, including the Ottoman Khan al-Nahhasin.

There were areas so badly damaged that I needed to look at a map to situate myself. On a tour of the market, I realized only after I’d walked toward the Souk al-Dahhab through the entrance closest to the Omayyad mosque that I had been there dozens of times before over the decades. Gone were the stalls that once sold selling frilly undergarments and candyfloss-colored synthetic dresses, socks, trinkets and scarves, keychains and hats– the cheap stuff before entering the main attraction- the gold market – were all gone.

Instead, a quiet, desolate stretch of nothing. A sign reading “UNDP Debris Removal and Recycling Project – Funded by Republic of Korea” hanging above an arched passageway.

Gone, too, were the high end shops, the jewellers, the handmade rugs, the silversmiths.

“I can’t even recognize where I am,” I told my husband Christian. My voice came out of my mouth in a resigned sigh, scanning my surroundings like someone emerging from a coma struggling to retrieve memories. For a brief moment, I thought I had gotten the location wrong. But I hadn’t. This was the place. To the right, a gaping hole where a building used to be.

Aleppo is the city of my parents and going there for the first time since the fall of the Bashar al Assad regime held an emotional charge that I did not experience when I reported from Damascus for NBC News a year before. The first few days were marked by relief that the damage, especially around the medieval-era citadel, wasn’t worse. There was a reconstruction effort started by the old regime, a new minaret replaced the one that collapsed at the Omayyad Mosque and, after the fall of Bashar al-Assad, organizations like the Aga Khan Foundation are doing good work to restore and rebuild large sections of the souk.

“They feel happy for each stone. Even now, when we go inside the souk, they always come and say welcome and thank you,” Yahia Albasha, a civil engineer with the Aga Khan Development Network tells me on a tour of the old Souk. The fund has worked on restoring several of the souks inside the medina.

Rebuilding Aleppo, however, will take much more than individual efforts. It will eventually require a massive nationwide reconstruction effort. But several people I spoke with told me bureaucracy has been painfully slow. The technocrats running Aleppo are not used to issuing permits and assessing technical proposals, according to several people I spoke with during my trip. “I offered to repair the pot holes in front of my own house months ago and I still haven’t heard back,” one restaurant owner told me. There isn’t a will to obstruct, I’m told, rather a bureaucratic slowness that would test the patience of most.

A shop owner in the old souk told me some restoration projects that had begun under the former regime were abruptly halted after the new authorities took over. It was not clear whether the work stopped because funding had dried up, or because the city’s new leadership did not want to inherit projects associated with the Assad era.

A common theme emerged from my conversations: the period of transition from the old regime to the new leadership, against the backdrop of economic collapse, post-war destruction, with important sanctions still in place, has not so far led to the creation of the technocratic efficiency the city so desperately needs.

In addition to all these challenges, there is quite simply no money in public coffers for meaningful reconstruction. Utilities have improved (I am told water and electricity supply have been much more reliable, for example) but other services like trash removal, repairing roads, rebuilding schools and hospitals, among others, have a long way to go. The World Bank estimates that post-war reconstruction in Syria will cost an estimated $216 billion, nearly ten times Syria’s entire national GDP. Aleppo alone accounts for $31 billion of that figure, in large part due to extensive structural damage to buildings.

In the end, perhaps we should look back to be able to look forward. This last war wasn’t Aleppo’s first battle. It wasn’t the city’s first siege. Or its first earthquake. Aleppo, one of the longest continuously inhabited cities in the world, came back every time.

We have to believe that it will again.

Every child I met in Syria last week was, in one way or another, a victim of war. As a refugee, an internally displaced child, deprived of schooling, or failed by a shattered education system. Not one of them was born before the conflict that devastated their country for nearly 15 years.

As I wrote in my last Substack, the most pressing issue for Syria is rebuilding its shattered economy. One of the main reasons this is so crucial is to give families the financial means to keep their children in school.

The numbers are staggering: according to UNICEF, 2.45 million children are out of school in Syria. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 7,000 schools were damaged or destroyed during the war.

The war that started in 2011/2012 led to a refugee crisis and academic catastrophe for an entire generation of Syrian children. In a country that was already struggling, a combination of factors that includes displacement, a collapse in GDP, sky-high inflation and widespread unemployment has cut million of vulnerable children off from basic schooling opportunities.

I travelled to eastern Aleppo, to a part of the city that was rebel-held during the early part of the war and that was relentlessly bombed by the Bashar al-Assad regime. There, an organization called the Karam Foundation, which worked for years with refugee children in Turkey, is helping repair damaged schools. It doesn’t take much to rehabilitate one structure: between $25,000 to $50,000 to get it back to a state that allows it to welcome back students.

The help is badly needed: more than a quarter of schools don’t meet basic safety standards in Syria. The U.N. documented 300 families who returned to the village of Kafr Amma in the Aleppo countryside that were forced to set up a temporary school in a local warehouse because their school was so severely damaged.

Lina Sergie, who heads the Karam Foundation, tells me her organization also provides $2,000 grants to refugee families returning to Syria from Turkey. “That covers the cost of travel, which is around $1,000, and a few months of rent and school supplies while they try to get back on their feet,” she tells me.

A teacher at the Omar Abdel-Azziz school in eastern Aleppo spoke of overcrowded conditions, with sometimes up to 70 children per classroom. There are issues with broken furniture and limited teaching supplies. Many schools are not accessible to children with disabilities, leaving some of the most vulnerable excluded.

As difficult as these conditions are, these children are the luckier ones. Millions of children, some as young as eight years old, are forced to work to help support families struggling with poverty and unemployment. Many toil away as street vendors, waste collectors, assistants in family businesses or small shops, or as casual laborers in construction, agriculture, and local markets. Even bright kids are pulled out of school when parents can’t pay for their supplies. Girls are married off too young when families need to accept dowries to make ends meet. This leaves young girls particularly vulnerable to exploitation and forced marriages.

And schools don’t just need to be safe and functional; they need to be guided by unified and inclusive curricula. Decades of state-controlled propaganda during the Assad era were removed from textbooks with major changes implemented in the last year. Religious teachings have increased while foreign language classes have decreased, for example. Some of the changes have led to concerns that the new government, headed by former Islamist rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharra, could entrench – and even strengthen - sectarian and political fault lines. But Syria can ill afford to exclude any of its children from learning in a safe and pluralistic environment. There can be no recovery without investing in all of them.

As Victor Hugo once wrote: “He who opens a school door, closes a prison.”

NB: Consent was obtained to film the children at both Quneitra and Omar Abdel-Azziz schools. The faces of the minor street vendors have been blurred to protect their privacy.

I will write in future posts about the emotional experience of returning to the city my parents came from, as well as the immense socio-political and sectarian challenges the country faces. But one thing became unmistakably clear during my visit: without a genuine economic and financial revival, Syria will struggle to recover from 15 years of war and sanctions, and from more than half a century of dictatorship built on corruption, cronyism and fear.

I am posting here a large chunk of my interview with the new governor of the Syrian Central Bank, Abdulkader Husrieh, a former Ernst and Young partner and graduate of Damascus and Durham Universities to give you a sense of what the new monetary authorities are doing to get the banking system back on track. The interview was conducted May 12, 2026.

Before diving in, consider some important facts below:

- The poverty rate has nearly tripled from 33% before the conflict to 90% today. Extreme poverty has surged to 66%. (UNDP)

- GDP declined from approximately $60 billion before 2011 to between $9 and $14 billion in recent years. (World Bank)

- Syrian inflation is down from 120.6% in March24/Feb25 but is still in the double digits at 36.8% during the same period, according to a report by the Syrian Central Bank.

- The Central Bank has signed a deal with Visa and Mastercard to introduce digital payments to the country but ordinary people still can’t use cards. Syria is still a 99% cash economy. (see my Instagram post here for more on that)

- Direct international bank transfers are still not possible. Though many sanctions have been lifted on the U.S. side – namely the 2019 Caesar Act - the last important move, removing Syria’s “State Sponsor of Terrorism” designation, has not cleared the U.S. Congress. Without it, international financial institutions are reluctant to reopen financial transfer channels with Syrian banks. (Interestingly, this designation dates back to 1979 when Syria opposed the Camp David agreements and is not related to the Assad regime’s crackdown during the civil war.)

- The Syrian banking system needs to be rebuilt. More accurately, it needs to be built. Just as crucially, there needs to be trust between banking customers and institutions. After Lebanon’s 2019 financial collapse, even the governor of Syria’s Central Bank acknowledged in an interview with me yesterday that he could hardly blame Syrians for doubting whether banks can truly keep their money safe.

- There needs to be transparency and independence for monetary authorities. This is something that has not fully happened yet.

- Bureaucracy remains a major hurdle, based on numerous conversations I’ve had with Syrians opening new businesses. One restaurant owner coming back from the UAE told me the Aleppo municipality was unresponsive and slow when it came to issuing business permits, comparing his experience to the efficiency he’d become accustomed to in the Emirates.

So far, ordinary Syrians I spoke with during my week-long visit to Aleppo told me basic services had improved. For example, electricity and water supply were more reliable than before the fall of the Assad regime. But unemployment, continued economic pain and the lack of a financial infrastructure continue to be a major worry. There is still a degree of goodwill toward the new government but my concern is there will need to be real progress soon if the new authorities want to build lasting trust with the population.

Syria is emerging from a 55-year nightmare and there are still many other issues to address, not least the sectarian mistrust from minority communities which I will be covering as well. But one reality overshadowed almost every conversation I had in Aleppo: if Syrians cannot build a viable future at home, the country’s recovery remains fragile and incomplete.