Syrian central bank governor Abdelkader Husriyeh said on Thursday the new government reached a milestone by performing its first international bank transfer using the SWIFT system.
Syria was locked out of the global transaction system in 2011, soon after dictator Bashar Assad launched a brutal civil war to remain in power.
SWIFT is the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, a secure messaging network headquartered in Belgium used by banks to arrange transactions between countries. It was established in the early 1970s as a successor to the relatively crude and slow Telex system.
As its full name implies, SWIFT is a communications system. It does not actually move money, but moving money around the world is very difficult without access to SWIFT. This is why economic sanctions against rogue states often begin with locking their banks out of SWIFT, as happened to the Assad regime in 2011, or Russia after it invaded Ukraine in 2022.
Assad was overthrown in December 2024 and forced into exile by a coalition of rebel groups with an unfortunate history of ties to international terrorism. The new government in Damascus, which describes itself as “transitional,” has been very eager to get international sanctions lifted by renovating Syria’s image.
The Western world is also interested in lifting sanctions because there is money to be made in Syrian reconstruction. The massive humanitarian crisis that has plagued the country since the outbreak of the civil war cannot be resolved until Syria rejoins the world community.
On the other hand, Western leaders have been hesitant to trust Syrian officials with past links to groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, especially with the threat of religious warfare and ethnic cleansing hanging over Syria’s minority populations.
The fortunes of the new government brightened considerably when President Donald Trump met with Syria’s “interim president,” Ahmed al-Sharaa, and expressed confidence in his leadership. Trump announced that U.S. sanctions against the Assad regime would be lifted following his meeting with Sharaa.
Central bank governor Husriyeh hailed the interim government’s first use of SWIFT — a commercial transaction between a Syrian bank and an Italian bank last Sunday — as a landmark in normalization. An Italian bank went first because several Italian construction companies have representatives in Syria to submit bids for reconstruction.
“The door is now open to more such transactions,” Husriyeh said.
After a virtual meeting between high-level Syrian and U.S. officials on Wednesday, Husriyah said he expected transactions with U.S. banks to begin soon.
“We have two clear targets: have US banks set up representative offices in Syria and have transactions resume between Syrian and American banks. I think the latter can happen in a matter of weeks,” he said.
Several major American financial institutions reportedly participated in Wednesday’s virtual meeting, including JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Citibank. The bankers said they were looking for significant reforms in Syria’s financial system, including protection against money laundering and terrorism financing.
“This transaction marks the beginning of a new era for Syria. This first SWIFT order symbolizes the end of sanctions and Syria’s return under the umbrella of the international community,” Lebanese banker Jassem Ajaka told the New York Times (NYT) on Thursday.
“Until now, any foreign business executive wanting to invest in Syria, or even to pay any local staff members, needed to cart around stacks of cash. Syrians are forced to pay for everyday items like bread using plastic bags full of bank notes because the currency is almost worthless,” the NYT noted.
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