Syria's business elite embrace Sharaa, push for Caesar sanctions repeal
Amid lingering fears and ongoing sanctions, Syrians are beginning to see signs of recovery and a fragile new beginning.
DAMASCUS/TARTOUS/HOMS — In an airy apartment in Damascus’ posh Al Malki neighborhood, where Syria’s toppled dictator Bashar al-Assad once lived, Ghassan Sukr, an avuncular Sunni industrialist shod in Gucci slippers, is planted before the family piano. He brandishes a hardcover book.
It is an Arabic translation of “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,” which was published in 2013 and earned its co-authors, the Armenian Turkish economist Daron Acemoglu and political scientist James A. Robinson, the Nobel Prize for economics last year.
Syria’s new president, Ahmad al-Sharaa, “has to read it, and I want to give it to him in person,” the sexagenarian insisted. This is because Sukr desperately wants Sharaa, the former jihadi commander from a bourgeois Sunni family who seized power in December, to succeed.
Sukr, whose detergent factory was bombed by regime forces in 2013, believes that Sharaa has what it takes. “They have a new approach. They think out of the box,” Sukr said of Sharaa and his new market-friendly cabinet that was unveiled in March. “We have given him a line of credit. The world should give him a line of credit, remove sanctions,” Sukr told Al-Monitor.
