This summer, a pair of Syrian brothers journeyed across Europe. Their story did not begin with a rubber dinghy afloat on the Aegean and a scramble for safety on to a Greek island: a well-worn route for many Syrian refugees fleeing a conflict that has lasted eight years and taken an estimated half a million lives.
Instead, these brothers landed in Cannes; their transportation, a plane, then a pair of Ferraris; their extravagances documented on social media and culminating on the party island of Mykonos.
Mohammad and Ali are the sons of Syria’s richest man, Rami Makhlouf, who also happens to be the Syrian president Bashar al-assad’s cousin and childhood playmate.
Before war broke out in 2011, Makhlouf was thought to control more than half of Syria’s economy despite the fact that he has been under international sanctions since 2008.
The 50-year-old tycoon was long considered the pariah regime’s banker but a recent fall from grace has given other war profiteers a chance to challenge his dominance.
The brutal civil war has torn Syria’s social fabric, creating the biggest population displacement since the second world war, with more than 12 million people forced to leave their homes.
The Assad family, autocratic rulers for nearly five decades, have all but wiped out the secular rebels, leaving jihadists as the armed opposition. Assad’s army is accused by the US and Europe of detaining, torturing and gassing tens of thousands of civilians.
With help from its military allies Russia and Iran, the regime has regained most of the country, though fighting continues in the north-west. But the battlefield victories have not brought financial relief. Most Syrians are sliding ever deeper into poverty.
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When the FT visited a cold, grey Damascus earlier this year, people queued in vain for governmentsubsidised cooking fuel and bread amid rolling blackouts and gas shortages. Some said they could only afford meat once a month.
“I’m waiting for a miracle,” sighed the owner of a generator shop who apologised for not offering tea because he was out of gas. “It’s the same for everyone.”
The war has hollowed out Syrian society. “The middle class is gone,” said Nabih, a regime insider speaking at a smart Damascus hotel. “Only the rich and poor are left.” As Makhlouf’s sons sped through Monte Carlo and SaintTropez in their expensive cars, the gulf between their extravagant summer holiday and the painful poverty inside their own country was enormous.
More than 80 per cent of Syrians were living below the poverty line by 2015, according to the most recent data available. The UN says the signs are that this has worsened.
Few can make money in Syria now. Gross domestic product has crumpled from $60bn annually before the conflict to an estimated $15bn in 2016. Military conscription, exile, injury and death have warped the labour force, leaving companies scrabbling for staff.
Businesses are hampered by energy and water shortages, and are regularly shaken down by the cash-strapped state. International sanctions have all but frozen trade with the outside world, while paying bribes are another squeeze on revenues — Syria is the second most corrupt country in the world, according to Transparency International.
But in every war there are winners. Newcomers who have profited over nearly a decade of conflict are now jostling with those at the top. This is the story of how a handful of men — two of them brothers — grew to dominate Syria’s devastated economy.
“There is a new class of wealthy war traders,” said Mazen, an Aleppo businessman from an old industrial family. The old guard call these people “new faces”. “We don’t know how they make money,” he continued. “Sometimes we ask ourselves if we’re in the wrong business.”
These individuals have made fortunes picking clean the carcass of the country’s economy. From melting down steel ripped from its shattered cities to brokering oil deals forbidden under international sanctions, to selling hotel rooms to aid workers, following the money leads us into the dark dealings of today’s Syria.
Their dramatic rise to fortune has also helped the regime to survive by keeping trade going, oil flowing and helping to fund proregime militias, even as the country lies in ruins around them.
Since coming to power in 1971, the Assad family has forged various alliances with Syrian elites. Under Hafez al-assad, and his Ba’ath party, Syria was socialist. His chosen partisans were mostly military men from his own minority Alawite sect.
Bashar, his son, was never supposed to be president. But the untimely death of Bashar’s swaggering older brother Bassel in a car crash pushed the shy Londontrained ophthalmologist to the throne. Bashar and his wife Asma, a British-syrian former banker, returned to Damascus where Hafez put him through military training.
When Bashar took the keys to Damascus’s presidential palace in 2000, he began making changes, increasing his appeal to western governments that his father had alienated.
He made a show of launching a neoliberalist programme to open up the economy, passing more than 1,000 laws and decrees between 2000 and 2011. Investment flowed into services and real estate, sidelining traditional manufacturing, while annual gross domestic product doubled between 2005 and 2010.
