The payment made by Ahmed eş-Şara with a Visa card in Damascus Old City became a symbol of Syria’s return to the international financial system. While Visa and Mastercard carried out the country’s first international card transactions on August 27, Washington had removed Syria from the list of “state sponsors of terrorism,” where it had been since 1979, just three days earlier. The payment, made in the presence of Central Bank of Syria Governor Muhammed Safwat Raslan, was made public through a short video.
However, the start of card transactions does not mean that capital is flowing into the country. The World Bank estimates the direct physical damage caused by the war at approximately $108 billion and the cost of reconstruction at $216 billion. Of this amount, $82 billion is allocated to infrastructure, $75 billion to housing and $59 billion to non-residential structures; Aleppo, the Damascus countryside and Homs are among the hardest-hit areas.
For Syria to attract foreign capital, banking oversight, contract security, property rights and correspondent banking relationships need to be strengthened. Trade with Türkiye increased by 42% in 2025, reaching $3.75 billion. In the first six months of 2026, exports rose by 26.4%, surpassing $1.28 billion; cement exports increased by 116.8%.
Why it matters
This development shows that Washington’s decision has not created immediate and unlimited normalization in the financial sphere: the start of international card usage is not the same thing as capital inflows into the country. The key issue facing Syria is to establish a reliable banking and legal framework capable of financing the reconstruction of infrastructure and housing areas heavily damaged by the war. For this reason, banking oversight, the enforceability of contracts, property rights and correspondent banking relationships will be decisive, particularly for foreign actors seeking to engage in reconstruction activities. Although the increase in trade with Türkiye and cement exports shows that economic engagement is continuing, the open question is whether this activity can evolve into a secured and broader financing channel.
Background
Türkiye is not a new name in the FikirPilot archive: we have published 33 articles mentioning it in the past 90 days; the most recent is dated September 2, 2026.