Widest protests since Assad’s fall put Syrian government fuel price hike on trial

The widest protests since Assad’s fall in Syria are entering their fifth day, triggered by the state’s decision to hike fuel rates over the weekend, raising diesel prices by 40%, gasoline by 26-28%, and industrial and household gas by 9%.

Damascus’ balancing act was not enough to stave off the protests: The government increased bread subsidies from 60% to 70%, while also cutting the price of subsidized flour for bread makers from SYP 20k to 15k per ton. Taken together, these moves are designed to offset the impact of fuel price hikes on bread — meaning they will result in keeping the price of subsidized bread unchanged, rather than reducing the price.

Behind the decision is a fiscal picture that fell apart this year amid record global crude prices. Syria posted a USD 1 bn deficit in 1H 2026 after a small surplus a year earlier, with spending up 331% y-o-y against revenue growth of 111%. The full-year gap is projected at USD 1.8 bn — about 5% of GDP. Fuel is the pressure point: locally produced crude covers only about a third of demand, and Syria’s biggest refinery in Baniyas is down for three months for maintenance, leaving the country dependent on crude and fuel imports, mostly from Russia.

This isn’t the first public backlash driven by economic grievances in post-Assad Syria. Freight truck drivers ran a national strike in early February over fees, fuel access, and competition from cross-border truckers; Latakia port drivers staged a sit-in over “special receipt” queue-jumping granted to trucks moving Iraqi crude in late August; and Hasakah drivers walked out over subsidised diesel cuts weeks ago.

IN CONTEXT- Syrians are already worn out by two years of subsidy cuts. Under Assad, bread and fuel were rationed through the Takamol-run smart card system, which allocated set amounts per family at heavily subsidized prices, but Al Sharaa’s government began dismantling that architecture almost immediately: bread was decoupled from the smart card after the fall, sending the nominal bundle price from SYP 400 to SYP 4k; the standard bundle weight was cut from 1.5 kg to 1.2 kg in February 2025, then to 1.1 kg in May 2026. On fuel, the caretaker transport ministry ended fuel subsidies for public transport in January 2025, before fully liberalizing pricing by July 2025 — a big shift given that in 2024, fuel and cooking gas made up roughly two-thirds of Assad’s price stabilisation budget.

And on a separate but still related track, Syria is turning to Saudi tech firm Cashin to help digitize its fuel supply chains. Under a 10-year agreement signed this week, Cashin will build a “field-to-bank” digital platform tracking petroleum products’ supply chain from production and imports through storage, transport, stations, and financial settlement. Why the digital fix now? Damascus is moving on a fuel and crude leakage problem it inherited from Assad, in an attempt to fix it before the sector settles into old habits. Like many post-conflict societies, Syria is a textbook case of how vulnerable it is to energy-sector corruption and smuggling, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s fellow Noam Raydan wrote earlier this year, citing post-1990 Lebanon and post-2003 Iraq as precedents for how quickly recovering energy sectors get hollowed out by corrupt schemes. Ensuring visibility over crude and petroleum product flows within the country would, at least, make smuggling more difficult. The mechanics are already familiar from the Assad years — an Internal Trade Ministry official acknowledged in 2020 that gas-station workers routinely dispense 30 liters instead of 40 and resell the difference at the unsubsidized rate, and the Syrian Petroleum Company told Levant24 in March that gas cylinders sell in Lebanon for roughly three times the Syrian price, driving large-scale cross-border smuggling.