An Expensive Bribe for a Syrian ID - New Lines Magazine
From an anonymous essay on a devastated Syria:
I hadn’t been to Syria in years, and what I now saw left me wondering how people were getting by and managing their affairs, given the inflation and corruption and lack of opportunity to make an honest — or even a decent — living. This was a country in postwar freefall, where the victor had no virtue and the victim was all but forgotten; a country still fractured, a people condemned to live at the mercy of the elements, the earthquakes and the occasional Assad and Russian airstrikes that continue up north, or to live in the shadow of international sanctions that cripple the parts of the country that are firmly in Assad’s grip. In the absence of something like a Marshall Plan to rebuild what has been destroyed (mostly by the Assad regime and the Russians), what seems to keep Syrians hopeful is some patched-together idea of moving forward to something that resembles the past, but worse.