Young Syrians Are Struggling to Imagine a Future in Their Country

This article originally appeared on VICE Arabia.

Syria has been embroiled in its brutal civil war for 11 long years. President Bashar Al-Assad, who stands accused of perpetrating horrific crimes against his own people, has so far prevailed with the help of his powerful ally Vladimir Putin, though some northern areas of the country are still under the control of rebels. But even in places where a fragile peace rules, hopes to rebuild and restart are very faint.

For one, the decade-long conflict has wreaked havoc with the nation’s economy and all sectors of its job market. Around 80 percent of the population live below the international poverty line (about €1.66 a day), a measure of extreme poverty below which people can’t meet their most basic needs. 

According to the latest estimates by the World Bank, over 583,000 jobs were lost in Syria between 2011 and 2017. Both the public and private sector were heavily damaged by the forced migration and internal displacement of over half of the Syrian population, the destruction of infrastructure and the total collapse of healthcare and other essential services. These factors saw the value of the Syrian pound crash against the US dollar, which resulted in a staggering increase in living expenses. 

Syrians who could potentially afford to invest in the economy use all their savings to send their children to Europe or to other Arab countries to work or study. Those who stay and work hard to graduate from the most prestigious faculties in the country – including medicine, engineering and pharmacy – barely have enough to provide for themselves and their families.

Dr Sulafa Al-Youssef, 29, is a gastroenterology graduate from Tishreen University in the port city of Latakia. During the five years of her specialist training, she received a salary of just over €10 a month, without any compensation for working extra hours or for her transportation costs. 

That was hardly enough to sustain herself, at a time when even food is extremely unaffordable. Right now, one kilo of lamb goes for about €7 on the Syrian market; a kilo of cheese, sugar, salt or grains costs €4.4 and one litre of vegetable oil costs €1.75. In other words, on her salary alone, she wasn’t able to properly feed herself.

Now unemployed, Al-Youssef depends on her brothers to help out with her daily expenses, plus on some occasional translation gigs. “I am waiting for the border between Iraq and Syria to open, to get a job in a medical centre in Iraq where I expect a salary of $2,000 [€1,740],” she tells VICE. The border between the countries has been officially open since 2019, but was recently shut down in December 2021 due to clashes.

Although similarly ravaged by decades of war, Iraq is much better off from an economic standpoint. For one, the country’s oil resources have kept its economy afloat throughout the war and helped its currency hold up against the dollar.

Syria also has oil – though much less than Iraq – and refineries are under the total control of the state, as it is an ostensibly socialist country where the government makes decisions about all vital sectors of the economy and strictly regulates private businesses. But the oil sector and many other parts of the Syrian economy have been damaged by over a decade of sanctions imposed by the US, the UK and the EU in response to President Al-Assad’s war crimes. 

On top of that, the Assad regime has absolute power in the country, which has often been abused. For instance, the Syrian government has recently been accused of manipulating the value of the Syrian pound for their own personal gain, further deepening the country’s economic crisis. 

Although most doctors in Syria find work within the state apparatus, the dream is to open up a private clinic so you can determine your own rates and working hours. But, as Al-Youssef says, that’s currently not an option for her or anyone she knows. “No one in Syria can open a clinic. You first need to buy medical equipment, which costs about $40,000 [€35,000],” she explains. The equipment is also extremely hard to find because of the sanctions. “Right now, I don’t even have money to buy or rent the premises,” Al-Youssef continues.

Orthopedic surgeon Dr Mohamed Salhab, 27, also did his specialism at Tishreen University. During his studies, he made the equivalent of just over €12 a month. It was hard for him not to be able to help out his parents, as he could barely take care of his own expenses. Just buying a single medical gown, which costs about €5, ate up almost half of his monthly budget.

Just like young doctors, Syrian engineering graduates also find themselves in a similar struggle to land a job that pays a living wage. 

Ro’a Al-Abdullah, 26, is a graduate in mechatronics – a discipline combining mechanical, electrical, computer and software engineering – from the city of Latakia. She started working right after graduating three years ago in an office of the Syrian government affiliated with the Directorate of Agriculture. 

But even though Al-Abdullah technically has a job, her actual day to day at work is less than ideal. “I don’t have a desk. I’m not even given work to do. I put a chair in the room and I just sit there,” she said. “My work is limited to opening a book to register agricultural vehicles and tools, and I only open the records once a month. I don’t work with my specialty or in the field I have studied.” Besides her frustrations with her job, her salary is just over €12 per month. “That’s not enough to pay for daily expenses or to go towards starting a family,” Al-Abdullah tells VICE.

Fellow mechatronics engineer George Kalash, 26, works in a food preservation factory in the countryside surrounding Latakia, supervising the production line. He chose a job in the private sector because he wanted to avoid being bound to a long-term government contract, as he says he’d like to travel in the future. 

Unfortunately, salaries in the private sector aren’t much better than those offered by the government – Kalash only makes about €26 a month. Due to the large number of unemployed graduates, private companies can offer extremely low wages and still find people who will take the job. Besides, “the private sector does not provide any guarantee – my contract doesn’t even have a penalty clause or clear conditions to protect my safety,” Kalash explains.

One of the sectors most severely affected by unemployment is pharmacy work. Since the Syrian regime has total control of the economy, newly graduated pharmacists are forced to take jobs in rural areas that would otherwise be underserved. But this policy has backfired – the Syrian countryside now has much more pharmacies than needed, with many of them hardly seeing more than a client or €0.50 in profits per day. 

Rahaf Al-Qassem, 25, opened her own pharmacy just outside the Mediterranean city of Tartous two years ago. She tells VICE the business hardly makes her any money at all, and that’s why she wants to open up shop at a better location in the city someday. The problem is, “Tartous can no longer accommodate new pharmacies,” she says, “and I don’t have enough money to enter the drug market anyway.” 

In fact, the Syrian pharmaceutical drug market has been through quite a bit of transformation in recent years, too. Before the war, the vast majority of drugs sold in Syria were made in the country by local factories and the sector was protected by laws that made it more difficult to import medicine from abroad. 

Today, most of these factories are either shut down or in ruins because of the conflict, making imports crucial to the Syrian drug supply chain. But strict import rules still apply and the Syrian pound is very weak, so many pharmacists are forced to trade drugs on the black market and import them illegally from other countries. “Your success no longer depends on your degree, but rather on your economic status and your ability to smuggle drugs and sell them,” Al-Qassem explains. 

While she waits for her chance to move her business, Al-Quassem is trying to land a job as a medical representative in the hopes to gain some form of financial stability. Many other pharmacy graduates have made the switch to pharmaceutical companies even though the sector is in a deep crisis, too.

Pharmacist Ruba Hattab, 26, recently resigned from a position as a representative at a pharmaceutical company. “I would work from morning till evening. The long hours and the hours spent traveling caused me to develop chronic pain in my back,” she says. Hattab only made about €17.50 a month, and adds that her company did not raise employees’ salaries even when sales went up. 

That’s why hundreds of Syrian pharmacists are also turning to the Iraqi labor market, where they’re looking to make €610 a month – enough to secure food and other basic needs while they wait for the situation in Syria to improve. 

But many others simply cannot imagine things getting better and just want to leave. Hattab says she now wants to try to get a scholarship to continue her studies in Europe and then maybe set aside some money to come back and work at a rural pharmacy near her home. For now, though, her dreams are on hold.