Syria’s widest protests since Assad’s fall follow a 40 percent diesel rise

Protests that began on 13 September after a weekend fuel-price bulletin have become the widest street action in Syria since Bashar al-Assad was toppled in December 2024. Demonstrators burned tyres and blocked the Damascus–Aleppo highway, the road from Aleppo toward Turkey, and tanker routes toward the central refineries. Crowds were reported in Hama, Khan Sheikhoun, Maarat al-Numan, Idlib, Raqqa, Deir al-Zor and Hasakah.

The Permanent Committee for Pricing Petroleum Products and Mineral Resources set new “temporary” prices from midnight on Sunday. Diesel rose 40 percent, from 125 Syrian pounds a litre to 175 pounds, about $1.32 at the rate Reuters used. 95-octane gasoline rose 28 percent to 195 pounds. 90-octane rose 26 percent to 185 pounds. Household and industrial gas rose about 9 percent. Since February, 95-octane has risen about 86 percent and diesel has more than doubled. Over the same stretch Brent has gone from $72.48 to above $104.

Energy Minister Mohammed al-Bashir said the rise closes a gap between what Syria pays to secure product and what it charges at the pump. He also pointed to an overhaul at the Baniyas refinery, which the government says will lift capacity from 80,000 to 130,000 barrels a day. Domestic crude output is about 102,000 barrels a day. Demand is about 325,000. The difference is imported, and the import bill has moved with Hormuz, insurance and the Yemen fighting that now sits on the Red Sea alternative.

Parliament has summoned al-Bashir. Some protesters have asked for him, the economy minister and the head of the Syrian Petroleum Company to go. Imad Abu Ras, a 44-year-old taxi driver in Aleppo, told Reuters that passengers were already refusing higher fares. “Now vegetables and everything else will go up with fuel prices. What is the solution? Steal? We can’t steal.”

The United Nations still puts about 90 percent of Syrians below the poverty line. That figure is the reason a 40 percent diesel move lands as a political event rather than a line in a budget. Diesel runs generators, irrigation pumps, buses and the trucks that move food between governorates. A pump price that jumps overnight is a food price within days.

The new authorities have spent twenty months telling the country that the war-economy rules of the Assad years are over. Fuel is the first large test of that claim. The state cannot subsidise a 223,000-barrel daily gap at last year’s prices. It also cannot raise the pump 40 percent and expect quiet in cities that learned, in 2011 and again in 2024, that a blocked highway is a language the palace understands.

SANA said the energy ministry will review prices as global conditions change and will work on refining and storage over a longer horizon. That is the official sequence: temporary bulletin, refinery work, later relief. The sequence on the road is shorter. Tankers that cannot reach Baniyas or Homs do not wait for the 130,000-barrel target. If the blocks hold into a third day, the shortage and the price will feed each other.

The comparison with Assad’s last years is exact in one respect and false in another. The crowds look the same. The demand this time is not for the president to fall. It is for the energy minister to explain why a country that produces a third of the fuel it burns chose a 40 percent diesel step on a Saturday night.