When the war that engulfed the Middle East in recent months cut off access to one of the world’s most important shipping routes, Syria saw an opportunity.
With multiple Mediterranean ports and borders with Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon, the country offers a desperately needed alternative to the blocked Strait of Hormuz, a strategic waterway that, before the war, was used to transport a hefty share of the global oil supply.
Iraq and Gulf states including the United Arab Emirates have already begun to transport oil and other goods overland to ship from Syria.
“After the closure of the Hormuz Strait, pretty much all the neighboring countries in the region knocked on our door to get access to our Syrian ports,” said Mazen Alloush, the director of local and international relations for Syria’s borders and customs authority. “They are making Plan B’s in case the crisis goes on longer.”
To take advantage of these new opportunities, however, Syria must overcome many obstacles, including widespread power and water shortages. Syrian infrastructure was devastated in a nearly 14-year civil war that ended in 2024, when rebels ousted the longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad.
Syria has a long history as a link in global trade.
“Syria was the old Silk Road. It was an important trade route,” said Hazem Alsabtee, the public relations director of Syria’s General Authority for Free Zones.
In the late 1960s, the Soviet Union sought out an alliance with the Assad regime partly to secure use of Syria’s Mediterranean ports.
Syria under the Assad regime was a land bridge that Iran used to transfer money and weapons to its most important regional ally, Hezbollah, in Lebanon. That ended when rebels overthrew Mr. al-Assad and shunned his close ally, Iran.
The latest war in the Middle East, which began when the United States and Israel attacked Iran at the end of February, drew in multiple countries around the region. Syria remained on the sidelines, even as fighting swirled all around its borders.
In neighboring Iraq, crude oil began piling up without a way to reach customers because of disruptions to shipping.
Iraq’s state-owned oil company, the State Organization for Marketing of Oil, asked Syria if it could transport crude overland to ship from the Syrian port of Baniyas on the Mediterranean, according to Safwan Ahmad, the director of public relations for the Syria Petroleum Company.
For Syria, it was a much-needed economic opportunity.
The country charges transit fees and handling fees at its ports. And in the longer term, Syrian leaders are hoping to persuade countries and companies that, to take full advantage of Syria’s assets, they need to invest in rehabilitating and rebuilding its infrastructure.
The al-Tanf border crossing, for instance, a key junction to move oil overland from Iraq, was not operational for years. Mr. Alloush, the Syrian border official, said fully rebuilding it would take at least some months and cost an estimated $25 million.
Still, Syria’s leaders did not want to miss out on a potential windfall.
So the port authority sent caravans, computers, a border control and passport team and mobile housing to quickly reopen it, Mr. Alloush said.
In late March, Iraq sent the first in a series of oil shipments. On some days, more than 400 tanker trucks cross the border, each carrying up to 10,500 gallons of crude oil.
Sometimes it is much less because storage tanks at the Baniyas port have limited capacity, according to Mr. Ahmad, of the Syria Petroleum Company, and an Iraqi oil ministry official.
Several foreign companies have also expressed interest in helping to revive an oil pipeline that used to link Baniyas to Kirkuk, in northern Iraq. It was damaged during Syria’s civil war, Mr. Ahmad said.
“Even if Hormuz reopens, countries have to find an alternative to the strait,” he said, as the world braces for the war’s lasting repercussions. “Syria will become the link to the sea.”
Last month, a first delivery of 200 vehicles from the United Arab Emirates arrived in Syria via Jordan overland and was shipped to Europe via Latakia, another Syrian Mediterranean port.
Mohamed Alabbar, an Emirati businessman who founded Emaar Properties, Dubai’s largest developer, said his group was considering investing up to $7 billion on Syria’s coast and up to $12 billion in Damascus. He was speaking last week at the first Syrian-Emirati Investment Forum, in the capital, Damascus.
“Syria now is at such a lucky moment,” said Karam Shaar, a political economist and the director of a Middle East consulting firm.
Syrian officials are trying to present their country as critical to the regional and global supply chain.
At a meeting in Cyprus last month, President Ahmed al-Sharaa of Syria told European Union leaders and regional partners that his country was positioned to become a secure and strategic corridor linking Central Asia and the Arab Gulf with Europe.
Speaking after a meeting with the Greek ambassador in Damascus, Mr. Alloush said the president had “reached out from the first days to all the leaders of neighboring countries in the region and told them that our borders, our ports, our roads, are ready.”
Mr. al-Sharaa’s government has set out to revive infrastructure and economic projects that had been damaged or stalled because of the civil war — such as the Arab Gas Pipeline, which aimed to transport natural gas from Egypt to Lebanon through Jordan and Syria.
“There is so much political appetite for reviving” these projects, Mr. Shaar, the economist, said, adding that many companies had asked his consulting firm about bids for energy pipeline projects. “And the U.S. government is very much behind such initiatives.”
Reconstruction costs for Syria could reach upward of $200 billion, with more than $80 billion for infrastructure alone, including roads, electricity grids, water supply networks and telecommunications, according to a World Bank report last year.
Although the United States has lifted most sanctions on Syria, the country remains on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, a designation which carries its own sanctions, including financial ones.
Last year, Syria made its first electronic transfer in 14 years with a Western bank, which was hailed as a key step toward rejoining the global banking system. But nearly a year later, Syria is still not connected to the SWIFT system that makes international wires and transfers possible — a major hurdle for investors.
Instability within Mr. al-Sharaa’s government and the lack of a functioning Parliament — nearly nine months after elections — have compounded a sense of uncertainty.
“There is a tendency in Syria for many of these projects to be announced but then not to come to fruition,” said Mr. Shaar, the economist.
Despite these challenges, Syria is working to attract foreign investment.
The port authority is racing to get Syria’s free trade zones — manufacturing sites and warehouses, often near ports and airports, that have no tax or customs — ready with at least a bare-bone level of services.
“If I’m an investor who wants to come, but there’s no electricity, there’s no water, there’s no steel, the basics needed for his work aren’t there,” said Mr. Alsabtee.
Still, he cautioned Syrians to be careful not to appear that they are exploiting the misery that the war has brought.
“We don’t want to say we succeeded because of a conflict,” he said.
Falih Hassan and Muhammad Haj Kadour contributed reporting.
