Assad meets with Russian delegation to discuss missile attacks and infrastructure repair

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is looking to acquire roughly $400 billion for Syrian restoration efforts from the Russian government. The Syrian president met with a delegation of Russian government officials over the weekend where he expressed that 7 years of war has badly damaged the country’s infrastructure.  The “infrastructure recovery” will take the amount specified and repairs spanning somewhere between 10 and 15 years to complete. Dimitry Sabljin, who is a member of the delegation that met with Assad, confirmed to the Russian news agency RIA Novosti that Russian based gas and oil companies would would be welcomed by the regime while western ones would not.

With a fiscal budget for nearly $6.2 billion, the Syrian government can not come anywhere close to their goal without utilizing external aid and the private sector. The United States Central Intelligence Agency states, “Syria’s economy has deeply deteriorated amid the ongoing conflict that began in 2011, declining by more than 70 percent from 2010 to 2017,” and,  “As of December 2017, approximately 13.1 million people were in need of humanitarian assistance in Syria, with 6.3 million people displaced internally, and an additional 5.4 million registered Syrian refugees, making the Syrian situation among the largest humanitarian crises worldwide,” on their website; summarizing the problem.