---
type: Country
title: Syria
description: Harry's observations from Syria months after the fall of the Assad government — a land border with no visa, dollars over a collapsed currency, sanctions that block even a SIM card, and a country solo travellers can enter for the first time in his lifetime.
tags: [syria, middle-east, damascus, sanctions, conflict, currency]
timestamp: 2026-08-05T12:00:00Z
---

# Syria

Harry travels Syria in spring 2025, months after the rebels took power and the
former leader was ousted. His framing is that this is a country nobody could
visit independently in his lifetime — you needed a tour guide and permission —
and that a foreigner can now walk around it alone.

The mood he reports is **wary but hopeful**, with the fear named explicitly:
that Syria goes the way of Libya or Iraq, where the dictator fell and the
country got worse.

## Observations

### From [Solo Entering the New Syria (After the Dictator Fell)](/videos/EhEjNmUEjfo.md)

- **The land border removes the visa requirement.** British citizens need a visa
  to fly in; crossing overland from Lebanon, Harry is told, you are stamped in
  free. That's what happened — about half an hour at the border.
- **The stamps in your passport matter more than the visa.** The questions were
  about where else he had been. He travels on two passports, which took some
  explaining.
- **Dollars are king.** You can pay in them directly, and the Syrian pound is
  changed on the street rather than in banks.
- **Two exchange rates.** The bank rate is bad; the street rate — everyone's term
  for it is the black market rate — is what Syrians use. Harry got 10,800 to the
  dollar against an online figure of 11,000, and $100 makes you a millionaire in
  a brick of notes you then have to carry.
- **Sanctions are the visible constraint.** No eSIM works here at all and a
  foreigner can't get a local SIM, so Harry travels the country with no data.
  Hotel prices are inflated for the same reason.
- **Reconstruction is the political question.** Billions are arriving from the EU
  and the UK; the figure Harry cites for what recovery actually needs is over
  $300 billion.
- **Security is heavy and mostly informal** — armed personnel in and out of
  uniform, which Harry compares to Afghanistan and says he is used to. He doesn't
  film them.
- **Damascus is safe; the rest is an open question.** Harry's own read is that
  the capital is very safe. A young policeman he talks to says flatly that the
  country is not safe — not Damascus, not anywhere. Both are recorded.
- **Society is more mixed than the demographics suggest.** Many women on the
  streets without hijab, Christians celebrating Easter, churches beside mosques,
  and a genuine nightlife — bars and tattoo shops in the old city.
- **The new flag is in use everywhere**, and Harry notes there is no emoji for it
  yet.
- **The food comparison to make is with Lebanon**, and Syria is the one people —
  including Lebanese people — say wins. Sweets especially.

### From [Hitchhiking with Rebels through the New Syria](/videos/wF17Hx5ul7o.md)

- **Fifty years under one family.** Hafez al-Assad took power in the 1970s and
  was succeeded by his son; the new government is three to five months old at the
  time of filming.
- **The population halved.** Around 22 million before the civil war, about 12
  million now, through death and displacement.
- **The destruction is countrywide, not localised.** This is the thing Harry says
  he was not prepared for — not pockets of ruins but whole cities, including the
  centres of [Damascus](/places/damascus.md) and [Aleppo](/places/aleppo.md).
- **Torture under the old government is a first-hand account here**, not a
  statistic: one of the men who gives Harry a lift was imprisoned for months,
  denied water, and had his fingernails pulled out.
- **There is a petrol crisis.** Fuel is smuggled from Lebanon and sold at the
  roadside in plastic bottles.
- **The average wage is $80 a month.** Food is cheap and everything else is not.
- **Checkpoints are frequent** on the roads between cities. Harry films none of
  them, and is helped through one by a soldier who wouldn't be filmed either.
- **Hospitality outruns him.** His drivers refuse the cigarettes he tries to buy
  them, buy him some instead, and pay for his onward taxi — and that taxi driver
  then declines to charge him twice.
- **A country running without a state.** With the rebel forces effectively the
  government and very little formal administration, Harry reports no looting, no
  disorder and almost no crime — money changers stack cash in public squares
  untouched. His comparison is that the UK without police would be far worse.
- **What Syrians say about safety, from someone who lives there**: safe, but not
  100%; people from the old government are still hiding and still killing; stick
  to the main cities.
- **Everyone speaks positively about the change** — and Harry flags on camera
  that he has heard nothing negative even off camera, and that people may feel
  they have to. It is the one place where the off-camera check comes back clean;
  see [expect a script on camera](/tips/expect-a-script-on-camera.md).

## Places

- [Damascus](/places/damascus.md)
- [Homs](/places/homs.md)
- [Aleppo](/places/aleppo.md)