Assad Falls

Macro Monday

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees recently estimated that there were 16.7 million people in need of humanitarian assistance and protection in Syria.

Assad Falls

Global news headlines are being dominated by the toppling of the Assad regime in Syria, following a 12-day operation conducted by a coalition of Islamist rebel groups that overwhelmed government forces.

Bashar al-Assad – who has ruled Syria with an iron fist since taking over from his father Hafez al-Assad in 2000 – is now in Moscow after being granted political asylum from his regime’s key backer, Russia.

The fall of Damascus marks the latest development in the Syrian civil war which flared up in 2011 during the Arab Spring, displacing well over 13 million people and killing over 300,000 civilians in the subsequent decade.

The international community continue to monitor the situation closely, as focus shifts on what the leading group within the rebel coalition, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), will do next. As of 2016, the failed state was understood to have 63% of its population living in extreme poverty (with this number now substantially higher) with economic losses of the conflict exceeding US$440 billion from 2012 to 2020. Hence, given the state of the country and its infrastructure, millions of Syrians remain in grave uncertainly. Concerns remain high across the international community, not least given that HTS was established in 2011 as an affiliate of Al Qaeda, with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (the then leader of IS group) being pivotal in its formation.

Key actors in the county’s war will be paying particular focus. For example, Syria has long represented a key staging post for Russia in the Middle East and Africa with Moscow understood to have dozens of bases in the country. The Wagner group also conducted operations in the country and it’s unclear what will happen next between rebel groups and Russian forces in the region, though Russia has called for an emergency session of the UN Security Council to discuss ongoing developments.

Iran – another key backer of the Assad regime – will also be monitoring events closely. As the New York Times points out, Iran’s ‘Axis of Resistance’ is continuing to unravel, and the fall of Assad will represent a major blow for Tehran who have used Syria as geographical link to move material and resources to Hezbollah, Hamas and other proxies in the region.?

While the US and other Western allies will welcome Assad’s fall, Washington have expressed concern over the “risk and uncertainty” that the ensuing power vacuum will have on the country and region. Here President Biden said that “As we all turn to the question of what comes next, the United States will work with our partners and the stakeholders in Syria to help them seize an opportunity to manage the risk.” In the interim, the US have stepped up bombing sorties against IS forces across Syria, with the West keen to limit the extent to which the terrorist organisation can exploit the latest developments.

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US Labour Market?

It was a mixed picture from US on Friday with data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicating that while nonfarm payrolls saw a meaningful increase, unemployment saw a marginal increase.

Against forecasts payrolls increase of 220,000 jobs, the US economy posted 227,000 new jobs over the month, marking the strongest print since September and a significant increase from October’s upwardly revised figure of 36,000. Here, a rise in employment was seen in health care, leisure and hospitality and government. Additionally, as workers from strikes the transportation equipment manufacturing sector experienced an increase in employment, primarily due. Conversely, the retail trade sector saw a decline in employment.

The latest figures indicate that the average monthly increase in non-farm payrolls this year was 186,000.?

While the unemployment rate saw only a small rise (from the 4.1% figure recorded in October to 4.2% figure recorded in November), the heat of the US labour market has undoubtedly eased from a year ago. For example, the number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) has risen from 1.2 million in November 2023, to 1.7 million in November 2024.

This comes as the number of people not in the labour force who currently want a job stands at 5.5 million – roughly the entire population of Barcelona.?