Syria Program Manager News Today

The catastrophic situation in Syria since 2011 has made the country one of the world’s largest recipients of humanitarian assistance, and the vast majority of these multi-billion-dollar aid flows to regime-held areas is facilitated by the United Nations. A new investigative report by the Syrian Legal Development Program (SLDP) and the Observatory of Political and Economic Networks (OPEN) has examined how private companies involved in human rights abuses benefit from the U.N.’s procurements i...

Damascus is reducing the gap between the official dollar exchange rate, which lags behind the widely used black market rate. The latter is the lodestar for Syrian traders, as it reflects the real value of the Syrian pound.