When Hayyan Maqsoud, the director of Syria’s postal service, returned to work on Tuesday, the first thing he did was remove the portraits of Bashar al-Assad and his late father, Hafez al-Assad, from the walls of his Damascus office.
“Finally we can breathe,” said Maqsoud, a lifelong civil servant, gazing at the spot where the portraits used to sit, the nails still in the wall and the outline of the frame visible against the faded yellow paint. Maqsoud asked his employees to return to work on Tuesday, two days after Assad fled ending his family’s 54-year rule over the country.
Despite the upheaval in Syria, mail must be delivered, Maqsoud said, proudly rattling off a list of services on which Syrians depend. “Pensions, packages, letters, business documents” all had to be distributed through the 210 offices that make up Syria’s national postal network, he explained.
Maqsoud had closed the post office headquarters last Thursday and ordered his employees to go home, unsure of what would happen to the country as Syrian rebels in the north blew through government forces and got closer to Damascus. He had no idea then that just a few days later the despotic regime that he grew up under would be toppled.
Maqsoud’s employees were among the thousands of civil servants who returned to their posts on Tuesday as Syrians in the capital city tried to resume normal life. The Syrian rebel leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, announced that ministers would be kept in their posts and civilian institutions during a three-month transitional government, to be led by a new prime minister.
Residents of Damascus slowly began to venture out of their homes by Tuesday, gathering in cafes and speculating wildly over the fate of the country – the speculation itself an act of joy after years of enforced silence. In the old Hamidiyeh souks of Damascus, crowds gathered and milled about as merchants opened their storefronts.
Bassel, who owns al-Masri clothes shop in the old souk, had just reopened his store to greet the throngs of people. “We will start working again and everything will hopefully be better,” he said. He decried the corruption of the Assad regime, which had carved up the country’s economic sectors and empowered a new class of war merchants over the last 13 years of civil war.
“Syrians are fantastic businesspeople, we succeed wherever we go. Now that things will be more orderly, you’ll see all of the diaspora come. Egypt, Europe, they will all miss us,” he said, laughing.
Maqsoud was excited at the prospect of change. The postal service had suffered under the economic crisis and civil war. More than half of the country’s postal offices had been closed since the Syrian revolution in 2011, as territory was divided up into different rebel fiefdoms outside the reach of the governmental body.
The Assad regime’s obsession with control and compulsive centralisation had hamstrung Syria’s mail service, which, like any other postal network, is a logistical behemoth with thousands of moving parts.
“If we wanted to order a single motorcycle, it would have to approved by the prime minister,” Maqsoud said. “There were certain postal service buildings that if I wanted to enter them, it required permission from Assad himself.”
Manhal Ghanm, the director of economic research at the Syrian central bank, who has worked there for 18 years, described similar scenes of kafkaesque bureaucracy under the old regime. The central bank was responsible for collecting and publishing national financial figures but could not publish any figures without prior authorisation from a separate government body, the central bureau of statistics.
The bank had not been able to properly calculate inflation for years as there had been no year where the economy had been stable enough to use as a reference. The consumer price index – a collection of basic goods used to calculate price inflation – was inaccurate because the government would not authorise the addition of any new goods to the economic metric.
As Ghanm spoke on Wednesday morning, the staff of the central bank were opening its vaults for the first time since last week. Rebel fighters had stormed the building when they took Damascus on Sunday – Ghanm’s office door had been broken and his laptop stolen – but the reserves were untouched. Staff said banking services should resume as normal in the coming days.
Jolani, speaking in a CNN interview last week, said the new Syrian state would be built upon solid institutions, not around a cult of personality. Maqsoud and Ghanm hoped that the promise of empowered institutions would allow them to properly do their jobs and improve public services – though neither had had any communication with the new rebel leaders.
In addition to internal reform, Syria will need help from the outside world. The country has been under US sanctions since 1979, which intensified to become some of the world’s strictest financial restrictions after the Assad regime cracked down on protesters in 2011. The postal service has been unable to deliver packages abroad for years and the central bank is cut off from the world’s financial communication network, Swift.
Though the sudden deluge of possibilities have dazzled technocrats and residents alike, there is still fear of the future, much of which is unknown. Rebels have promised a moderate form of Islamic governance, and the head of the new transitional government had promised that the rights of all faiths will be respected, but years of watching extremist fighters in opposition-held territory have worried Damascus residents.
An employee at the central bank who is from a religious minority background and did not wish to be named said he had advised his wife to start wearing a head covering outside of the house. He had received a threat from someone living in Idlib after he posted a picture of him and his wife at the beach online. He now locks the door behind him when he leaves for work, worried for his wife and children inside.
“Until now, nothing has happened and the opposition is making all the right statements,” the employee said. “But we are worried, we are very, very worried.”
