by Arabi Souri
President Bashar Assad and First Lady Asmaa Assad visited an exhibition in Damascus dedicated to Aleppan industrialists, during his visit President Assad exposed a grand theft of Syrian money by Lebanon.
“At the minimum, the estimates at the lowest were 20 billion dollars, and at the maximum, it was 42 billion dollars. We do not have a real figure,” President Assad told the crowd that surrounded the first couple, he added: “This number for an economy like Syria is a frightening number.”
President Assad did not belittle the US and EU blockade coupled with the blockade of their followers around the world against the Syrian people, he drew the timeline of the current crisis with the main factors of the war of terror and war of attrition waged on the country by NATO and stooges which the country is going through for nearly a decade; the Syrian President emphasized on the coinciding of the beginning of the current severe crisis, ‘that Syria never lived through since it independence – in 1945’, with the blocking of depositors accounts by the Lebanese Central Bank starting a year ago.https://videopress.com/embed/WHFHnAhD?preloadContent=metadata&hd=1The video is also on BitChute and YouTube.
The following is the English translation transcript of the above video:
First of all thanks to you, were it not for your steadfastness in Aleppo, and if it were not for you decided from the beginning to be positive, effective and have a challenge, which any person needs to succeed, especially in these circumstances, had it not been for all of this, we would not have reached this successful beginning.
When we meet with producers in these special circumstances, difficult circumstances, and harsh conditions that Syria has not lived through since the days of independence, this carries a special message and full of meanings.
3 and 4 years ago, Aleppo was besieged from all sides and the bombing on it did not stop and its production did not stop, so the issue is not the subject of a siege, so if a siege on Aleppo could not affect, the siege on Syria, which is not more severe than the siege on Aleppo, would not be the cause of the problem that we are going through. With it, there are issues that we are affected by, such as the issue of (the United States’ theft of oil), the issue of wheat supplies, the burning of wheat in the northeastern regions, there is no doubt that all of this has an impact, but the economic problem has another reason that no one is talking about, and that is the money that the Syrians withdrew (from Syria) and deposited in Lebanon, and the banks in Lebanon were closed, so we paid the price, this is the essence of the problem that nobody is talking about.
It is easy to always blame the state and the government, mistakes exist with every one and this is another issue, but the current crisis is not related to the blockade, the blockade has been imposed on us for years, this does not mean that the siege is good and the Americans are innocent, no, the blockade directly harms all aspects of life, but the current crisis that started several months ago, caused by this issue (the closure of banks in Lebanon) because the crisis began before the Caesar Act and began years after the blockade, so what coincided with it? It is the money that’s gone.
At the minimum, the estimates at the lowest were 20 billion dollars, and at the maximum, it was 42 billion dollars. We do not have a real figure. This number for an economy like Syria is a frightening number.
