WHEN the conflict 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 Turkiye, 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 neighbouring 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 Bs 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 longtime dictator Bashar 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 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 Assad and shunned his close ally, Iran.
The latest conflict 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 neighbouring 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 Organisation 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 Co.
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.
Alloush, the Syrian border official, said fully rebuilding it would take at least some months and cost an estimated US$25mil.
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, 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 40,000 litres of crude oil.
Sometimes it is much less because storage tanks at the Baniyas port have limited capacity, according to Ahmad 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, 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.”
“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, President Ahmad 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.
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, Karam, the economist, said, adding that many companies had asked his consulting firm about bids for energy pipeline projects.
“And the US government is very much behind such initiatives.”
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-bones 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,” Hazem said.
Still, he cautioned Syrians to be careful not to appear that they are exploiting the misery that the conflict has brought.
“We don’t want to say we succeeded because of a conflict,” he said. — ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
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