Syria’s opposition and rebels have taken a string of cities and towns from the Syrian military since the start of 2015, but thanks to pressure from the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS) and the Assad regime, they are facing devastating shortages of fuel.
Syria has been beset by a crisis over oil and gas supplies amid the escalation of the four-year conflict, with the Assad regime losing almost all of its oil fields and about half of its gas fields to ISIS. Damascus has been forced to cut subsidies, further raising prices for businesses and residents—but the shortages on the government side have been mitigated by ISIS’s regular sales of fuel to the regime.
In contrast, ISIS has imposed a cutoff on the rebels, which it has been battling since January 2014. In northern Syria, ISIS has not only refused to sell the rebels oil and gas, but has blocked longtime smugglers from doing so.
Cut Off
As the opposition has consolidated its control of newly captured areas—notably in Idlib Province, but also in other territory extending into central Syria—it has taken control of agriculture, factories, businesses, aid deliveries, bakeries, water supply, and infrastructure such as hospitals. The lack of fuel is making those services almost nonfunctional—and the price of bread has doubled and even tripled in only a few weeks. Gas prices have also tripled.
On June 16, Syrian civil defense teams issued a call for help from humanitarian organizations, as well as a token appeal to “all those responsible for the fuel crisis” to ease the restrictions. The head of civil defense, Raed a-Salih, confirmed that the crisis had “all but paralyzed” rescue work.
In northern Hama Province, the rebel-affiliated Health Administration declared the suspension of all hospital and clinic work from Monday because of the diesel crisis. A Syrian Civil Defense worker told me 14 newborn babies had died at a hospital in Maarat al-Numan because there was no fuel for incubators: “We’ve stopped everything other than ambulance work. We can’t use our machines to get people out of the rubble after bombings anymore—there’s no fuel for it. So we’ve gone back to digging them out by hand.”
