Like other Syrian fields of activity, the sector of education with its two sides – education and higher education – has deteriorated rapidly throughout the years of the crisis. Apart from occasions’ slogans about the importance of the education sector in the country, figures reveal a disastrous decline at all levels in this sector, including government spending on it, which kept rapidly shrinking and reducing until we reached a point where the government (discretionary) spending on the education sector in 2021 has not even reached a quarter of what it used to be in 2010. 

Eleven years after the crisis erupted in the country, its disastrous impacts have affected the entire society, and of course, children were the most vulnerable and fragile segment. The crisis and its repercussions have left millions of children in need, who are obliged to coercively engage in labor market to fill part of the huge gap between wages and the minimum of food and living costs. Meanwhile, the vast majority of these children live in unsuitable environments and consequences that threaten them with negative social impacts that may expand to a minimum of two generations.

Eleven years after the outbreak of the crisis in the country, humanitarian needs are still aggravating in Syria, given the long-term consequences of the wide spread destruction of infrastructure across the country. In addition to the acceleration of the economic downturn that began before the crisis erupted, and grew in frequency during it, causing Syria to become the country with the most internally displaced people in the world.

Since the 2008 crisis erupted, at the time being called the “financial crisis”, it became clear to the “People’s Will Party” that the crisis would not stop and will continue to deepen reaching the main nerve of the capitalist system in its modern form. That is, towards production, then towards the dollar.

Since events in Ukraine started, the extremists from both Syrian sides rushed to look within these events for something that supports their previous slogans of “resolving militarily” and “toppling”. This behavior – apart from being detached from reality – represents turning a blind eye to three catastrophic coordinates of the Syrian reality, which continues on growing deeper and more painful.

The Syrian healthcare sector is facing crises and chronic problems that are reflecting in the lack of the availability and quality of healthcare services across the country. Alongside the inability to determine the real effects of the spread of Coronavirus in the country, in absence of reliable government figures on cases and deaths, disruption in healthcare services and systems continues. This is not only because of the spread of the virus and the conditions of the Syrian crisis, but mainly because of the decline in government expenditure on healthcare sector, which continues to reduce constantly and rapidly.

The last Kassioun editorial was titled: “The End of the Petrodollar Era?”, and the subsequent events quickly confirmed what was written therein. Specifically, last Wednesday, Russia
announced that it would sell its gas exclusively in rubles to “unfriendly countries”, and not in dollars or euros.

The suffering of the country is exacerbating at all levels, and the crisis that has been going on for 11 years now is exacerbating the danger that is affecting the country at the level of agriculture and food security. In the previous issue of Kassioun, we have reviewed how the numbers of Syrians exposed to the risk of food insecurity have increased to about 13.9 million people, (12 million of them are already facing severe food insecurity, while 1.9 million are at risk of being food insecure). All this is in conjunction with the rise in local statements that are “promising us” with further decline in the field of agriculture and food, as the increase in prices has become a “global phenomenon” simultaneously with the global crisis of food and energy.

Despite the series of public objections and rejections that came in response to the Syrian government Resolution of lifting subsidies away from strata of the Syria people, some of its officials insisted on trying to “justify” the Resolution in several ways. The last of which was making Syrians feel “indebted” for the amount of subsidies announced in the State’s general budget of 2022, which amounts to approximately 6 trillion Syrian pounds, in a way that suggests two things: The first is that this announced figure will actually be spent on subsidies. The second is that government subsidies have increased given the announced jumps in the figures of subsidies of this year compared to the past year, as the figure of subsidies for 2022 is 63% higher than in 2021, when the government allocated 3.5 trillion Syrian pounds for social subsidies.

The past weeks have revealed sufficiently clearly what Kassioun has previously said since the Ukrainian event started, which is that Ukraine itself is only the tip of the iceberg in a conflict that extends much deeper and broader, and one that revolves around the nature and future of the existing world order in its entirety.