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By John Davison, Allison Martell and Reade Levinson
May 1, 20256:00 AM GMT-3Updated 13 hours ago
DAMASCUS - Iran had a grand plan for Syria – taken right from the playbook of a country it considers its arch-enemy.
Just as the United States solidified its global dominance by investing billions in rebuilding Europe after the Second World War, Iran would do the same in the Middle East by reconstructing a war-ravaged Syria.
The ambitious program, outlined in a 33-page official Iranian study, makes several references to “The Marshall Plan,” America’s blueprint for resurrecting post-War Europe. The U.S. strategy succeeded: It made Europe “reliant on America,” a presentation accompanying the study says, by “creating economic, political and socio-cultural dependence.”
The document, dated May 2022 and authored by an Iranian economic-policy unit stationed in Syria, was found by Reuters reporters in Iran’s looted Damascus embassy when they visited the building in December. It was among hundreds of other papers they uncovered there and at other locations around the capital – letters, contracts and infrastructure plans – that reveal how Iran planned to recoup the billions it spent saving President Bashar al-Assad during the country’s long-running civil war. The Syria-strategy document envisions building an economic empire, while also deepening influence over Iran’s ally.
Darth Vader: Finally the empire will rise and we're now conquest the galaxy!
- Why sir? You cant even take care of our little army!
“A $400 billion opportunity,” reads one bullet point in the study.
These imperial hopes were crushed when rebels hostile to Iran toppled Assad in December. The deposed dictator fled for Russia. Iran’s paramilitaries, diplomats and companies beat their own hasty exit. Its embassy in Damascus was ransacked by Syrians celebrating Assad’s demise.
The building was littered with documents highlighting the challenges facing Iranian investors. The documents and months of reporting reveal new insight into the doomed effort to turn Syria into a lucrative satellite state.
Reuters interviewed a dozen Iranian and Syrian businessmen, investigated the web of Iranian companies navigating the gray zones of sanctions, and visited some of Iran’s abandoned investments, which included religious sites, factories, military installations and more. Those investments were stymied by militant attacks, local corruption, and Western sanctions and bombing runs.
Among the investments was a €411 million power plant in coastal Latakia being built by an Iranian engineering firm. It stands idle. An oil extraction project is abandoned in Syria’s eastern desert. A $26 million Euphrates River rail bridge built by an Iranian charity linked to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei collapsed under a U.S. coalition airstrike years ago, and was neither repaired nor fully paid for.
- Here is were we gonna build our new empire. Finally some peace without those Disney producers, and we're gonna have some real hotgirl in tiny bikinis.
The roughly 40 projects in the abandoned embassy files represent a fraction of Iran’s overall investment. But in this assortment alone, Reuters found that Syria’s outstanding debts to Iranian companies toward the end of the war amounted to at least $178 million. Former Iranian lawmakers have publicly estimated the total debt of Assad’s government to Iran at more than $30 billion.
Hassan Shakhesi, a private Iranian trader, lost €16 million in vehicle parts he shipped to Syria’s Latakia port just before Assad fled. “I’d set up an office and home in Syria. That’s gone,” said Shakhesi. He said he was never paid for the goods, which disappeared. “I hope Iran’s long history with Syria isn’t just wiped out. I’m now having to look at business elsewhere.”
Pieces of shredded documents are scattered on a poster of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, at the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria, December 16, 2024.
REUTERS/Amr Alfiky
Ultimately, Iran’s hopes to emulate the Marshall Plan and build an economic empire encompassing Syria went more the way of America’s debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Early intervention in Syria’s civil war on the side of Assad deepened Iran’s influence over this gateway to the Mediterranean Sea. The story of the squandered investments reveals the financial risk that brought, and how the mutual reliance of the pariah governments of Syria and Iran hurt both.
For Iran’s rulers, Assad’s fall and the collapse of their Syria plans come at a precarious time. They have been weakened by Israel’s decimation of the Islamic Republic’s key proxies, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
They are under pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump to negotiate a deal that could neuter Iran’s nuclear program, or face possible military action if they balk. Iran’s regional rivals, including Turkey and Israel, are rushing to fill the vacuum left by its departure. The nascent Syrian government, for its part, has to contend with multiple frozen infrastructure projects as it tries to rebuild the war-ravaged country.
New Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa
Reuters reporters discovered an array of documents as they visited Iran’s centers of soft power in Syria after Assad’s fall – diplomatic, economic and cultural offices. They photographed nearly 2,000 of the records, including trade contracts, economic plans and official cables, and left them where found. Reporters then used artificial intelligence, including the AI legal assistant CoCounsel owned by Thomson Reuters, to summarize and analyze the texts.
Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said in December he expected the new Syrian leadership to honor the country’s obligations. But it’s not a priority for the new government, led by a former rebel group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, that fought Assad and his Iranian backers.
Iranian government officials did not respond to requests for comment about the findings by Reuters.
“The Syrian people have a wound caused by Iran, and we need a lot of time to heal,” the new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, said in an interview in December. Neither al-Sharaa nor other officials from Syria’s new government responded to requests for comment from Reuters about Iran’s role in the fallen regime. Sharaa’s HTS, initially an offshoot of Al Qaeda, severed those ties years ago and says it wants to build an inclusive and democratic Syria. Some Syrians, especially non-Sunni minorities, fear it retains the jihadist goal of establishing an Islamic government.
For most Syrians, the departure of Assad and the Iran-backed militias was cause to celebrate. Those Syrians who worked with Iranians have mixed feelings, however, about the exodus of Iranian business, which has left many of them without an income.
"A 33-page document found at the Damascus embassy lays out Iran's dream of a Marshall Plan-style revival of Syria. The highlighted bullet point says: "A $400 billion opportunity to reconstruct Syria, and Iran's share."
- That's how were gonna be the next big thing in middle east!
Those writing are from Fifty shades of Gay, sir!
“Iran was here, that was just the reality, and I made a living from it for a while,” said a Syrian engineer who worked on the idled Latakia power plant.
The engineer asked not to be named for fear of reprisals for working for an Iranian company, after a spate of revenge killings last month against Syrians associated with the old regime. He said the Latakia project was hobbled by financial problems, Syrian corruption and underqualified workers from Iran, but that once completed would have boosted Syria’s struggling grid.
“The power plant was something for the future of Syria,”
he said.
IRAN’S MAN IN SYRIA
The man tasked with executing Iran’s economic plans in Syria was a bearded construction manager from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps named Abbas Akbari. He was promoted with fanfare in March 2022 to lead a unit called the Headquarters for Developing Economic Relations of Iran and Syria. Its task was to boost trade and recoup Iran’s investment. His team produced the study that held up the Marshall Plan as a model.Akbari enlisted comrades in the Revolutionary Guards, an elite branch of Iran’s military, to help with logistics on civilian projects.
Reuters found letters signed by Akbari in Iran’s looted embassy. The documents include details of projects he supported and the money spent. Near the scattered papers was a vault and a pack of C4 explosives discovered by fighters who were guarding the building. Akbari did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Iran’s foray into Syria began long before Akbari’s arrival. Mapna Group, an Iranian infrastructure conglomerate that hired the Syrian engineer who worked on the Latakia project, won its first major contract in 2008 to expand a power plant near Damascus. That was soon followed by a second contract to build another plant near the city of Homs.
The deals were part of a growing Iranian investment in Syria in the years ahead of the 2011 uprising against Assad, as U.S. sanctions shut off both countries to the West. They were the fruit of a relationship dating back to the Iranian revolution of 1979, which led to the overthrow of the Shah and the establishment of the Islamic Republic.
Assad’s father, President Hafez al-Assad, was the first Arab leader to recognise the republic and helped arm Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s fledgling Shi’ite Muslim theocracy in its 1980s war with Iraq. They fought Israel during the Lebanese civil war – Iran via its Hezbollah proxy – and later sent fighters and weapons to resist the American occupation of Iraq after 2003.
Iran’s political investments in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon paid off for years. Like Iran, Iraq and Lebanon have significant populations of Shi’ite Muslims, and Shi’ite paramilitaries nurtured by the Revolutionary Guards dominated successive governments in Baghdad and Beirut. Syria became the key transit route for weapons and personnel across the “Axis of Resistance,” the name Iran gives to the armed groups and states it supports against Israel and the West.
To be continued:
