$60 Billion Needed To Save Syria After Assad Falls – OpEd

By Burc Kostem

The Syrian opposition has announced it will need $60 billion in aid within its first 6 months of taking power to prevent the country from plunging into complete chaos a senior member of the Syrian National Council reports.

The money is needed to secure the day-to-day safety of the country and its people, as well as providing housing for the millions of people who are left on the streets as a result of the regimes brutal bombing of 2.5 million homes as well as many other important buildings.

The security issue will be a significant challenge for the new Syrian state according to some experts, as the security environment is becoming more and more fragile. A representative of the Syrian National Council Atassi told the AFP “This is a phase in which the Syrian state must not collapse” referring to the state that the conflict has reached. However exhausted military equipment and personnel, along with the deterioration of other state tools and sources means this will lead to “significant security and economic problems”.

The German Ambassador to Syrai Volkmar Wenzel also commented on the issue expressing the view that “the need assessment of $60 billion may be a right, however, the time frame of six months is highly unlikely as we know from experience that matters of reconstruction and its implementation take time.”

USAK Middle East Expert Ali Hussein Bakeer had already drawn attention to this issue several weeks ago in an article published in the USAK monthly magazine Analist and later translated as a column piece for the Journal of Turkish Weekly, warning that: “The persistence of the Syrian crisis, the support of certain states for the Assad regime or what left of it, and the lack of action by the international community in terms of helping topple the regime and replacing it with a democratic one or at least in terms of protecting civilians, is causing the resources of the Syrian state to be increasingly exhausted. This will have very serious implications for the post-Assad transitional period, which is supposed to lead us toward a production of a democratic system that would protect the Syrian people and their fundamental rights and freedoms.”

This discussion comes as the Syrian National Coalition is increasingly gaining legitimacy as the only representative of the Syrian people in most Western eyes. Yet despite this momentum that the Syrian National Council has gathered, there is no doubt that the persistence of the conflict is damaging the lives of generations of Syrians to come.