The Syrian foreign ministry issued a decree on April 24 to its embassies, instructing them to issue and renew passports and travel documents to Syrians abroad regardless of status, reported Al-Arabiya on April 25.
Nearly four million citizens have left Syria since the beginning of the war and now live abroad. At least 1.5 million of them need to renew their passports, reported SAS News late last month, citing statistics from economic analyst Mohammad Khalil. Passport renewals now cost $400, up from $200.
The government decree on passports is one of the measures the Syrian regime has taken to accumulate revenue. But while observers have looked to shaky data as a sign of its imminent collapse, the Syrian economy, and by extension, the regime, is still far from falling apart, says Iyad al-Jafari, the editor-in-chief of the pro-opposition economic news site Economy: Syrians’ Money and Jobs.
“We cannot say that the Syrian economy is in a state of complete collapse until the state treasury can no longer pay state employees’ salaries or finance state institutions,” al-Jafari tells Syria Directs Mohammed al-Haj Ali.
Here, al-Jafari, whose news site is an affiliate of Zaman al-Wasl, explains that even if the government cannot cover public-sector salaries, “this will not lead to a complete regime collapse, but rather will result in its reduced influence within Syria’s political arena and make it nothing more than a faction among several warring factions.”