Syria is trying to integrate again into the global economy, after decades of isolation under the Bashar al -assad rule, which raises questions about the fact that the new Damascus government will be forced to pay the enormous debts supported by the previous regime during the war.
Donald Trump announced last Tuesday that the United States will raise the penalties to Syria, and this statement came before his meeting with the president of the new country, Ahmed al -Shara, who previously took on the leadership of the “headquarters for the liberation of Al -Sham”, the opposition group that reached the Assad regime in December.
In the middle of the attempts of the new government to reconstruct the exhausted Syrian economy, the enormous sovereign debt file is highlighted, as it is one of the issues that must be addressed. The Assad regime borrowed enormous sums, most of which come from Russia and Iran, after the outbreak of the civil war in March 2011.
When Iranian journalists collected, last December, the question of “Syria debts in Iran for $ 50 billion” during the weekly press conference of the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Ismail Baqai, the latter denied that the amount would be “50 billion dollars”, without denying the presence of debts on Syria. He invited the new sentence to Damascus to comply with his commitments in accordance with the agreements and contracts concluded with the regime of the former president Bashar al -assad, at a time when ambiguity has failed by the relations between Syria and Iran, which was supported by the previous rule since 2011, different, money and militias.
Last March, diplomatic sources revealed interviews between Damascus and Moscow on the Syrian debt due to the Russian government, which varies between 20 and 23 billion dollars.
However, the greatest question of today, the new Syrian government can refuse to pay these debts, under the pretext that the money, directly or indirectly, was used to try to suppress the revolution that was imposed in the end? The truth, is this not a simple problem? A report on “Reuters” raises this question of two specialists who regularly hold the lessons on the debts of the sovereign countries, the Bouchit, a professor of law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Edinburgh, and Method Golaati, professor at the Faculty of law at the University of Virginia.
The question of “succession of governments”, or its succession, is one of the strongest rules of international law. It is assumed that the new governments of any state inherit the rights and obligations left by the previous departments, regardless of the various political ideologies between them, the commitment to pay the debts supported by these previous regimes is an absolute commitment, or almost. Whether the Bolsheviks replaced Caesar in Russia in 1917, or Corazon Akino overturned Ferdinand Marcus in the Philippines in 1986, or Trump replaced Joe Biden in 2025, the existing principle remains one: each new government inherited the previous obligations, even if it is considered corrupt or not addressed.
In fact, there are many exceptions to this rule, but the most controversial exception, especially on legal level, is known as “hateful debts”. Imagine a corrupt dictator who borrows money in the name of a country, then stealing that money and flee to the French Riviera. Is it right or is the law asked to pay those who are oppressed to pay those loans they have not benefited in any way?
The scholars of the law have discussed this problem for more than a century without achieving consent, and this is often due to their inability to agree on what makes a religion (or a debtor) enveloping to the extent that it is considered “hateful” by the legal perspective.
Therefore, according to the two experts, it is unlikely that the new Syrian government is able to successfully exploit this topic to evade Assad’s debts.
However, there is a debt model that most people agree that it should not be obliged to the new government; This is known as “war debts”. The classic scenario here is that the revolutionaries fight the regime in power to impose control of the country and the regime borrows money to buy and repress weapons. If the revolutionaries win, is it logical to be forced to pay that money that were mainly used to fight and exclude them from the sentence?
In this regard, there are historical precedents: in 1883, the Mexican government refused to pay the debts that Emperor Maximilian from Habsburg, in the middle of his attempt to cling to power. After Bueir’s war was lit in 1899, Great Britain took the position that would have recognized only the debts supported by the South African government before the start of the war, not after it. As for the topic I made to justify this, it was here that the victorious party in a war was not obliged to pay the debts supported by the defeated party after the start of the fighting.
In the 70s, Cambodia refused to pay the debts to the United States dating back to 1974-1975, when the NOL color system, supported by Washington, was fighting in a civil war that he lost in front of “Khmer al -hamr”. And if we believe that “war debts” are already a legal exception recognized to the principle of succession of governments, the new Syrian government could be able to exploit this legal base, especially since Assad borrowed money during the fighting.
However, there are more complicated questions: is it necessary to distinguish between the new money that was lent after the start of the war, and the old one that had the right to pay during the fighting, but was postponed by a voluntary agreement? Both models contributed to the financing of the war.
It is certain that the settlement of the Syrian debt file will be a complex process, but the new government could have a legally profitable document in his hand.
