When his Russian bosses and the mercenaries protecting them finally left, Homam Kasouha walked into the plant’s head office and did something he had yearned to do for years.
Lifting Vladimir Putin’s portrait off the wall, he placed it on the leatherette sofa and turned it around so he would no longer have to look at it.
Then, having done the same with the picture of Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s fallen dictator, he went down the corridor, ripping down the adhesive Russian flags stuck to each door.
Mr Kasouha disliked his Russian masters, less for political reasons — though there were those, too — than for what they had done to the fertiliser plant, once the biggest in the Middle East, where he had worked for 24 years.
The Russians, in the form of a company owned by one of Putin’s closest friends, Gennady Timchenko, the oligarch, had arrived in 2019 with grand promises to restore the plant to its former glory and a contractual obligation with the Syrian government to invest £160 million in doing so.
Instead, says Mr Kasouha, they engaged in five years of plunder, milking every cent they could until they ran the plant into the ground, stealing the last items of value as they fled just before Assad’s fall on Dec 8.
“They promised to invest, but all they did was to extract,” said Mr Kasouha, the plant’s deputy manager and head of accounts. “They were here purely for themselves.”
The vast fertiliser plant in Qattinah to the southwest of the shattered city of Homs is the story in microcosm not just of Syria’s flailing economy but also of how Russia ruthlessly exploited it and the huge challenges its new leaders will face in restoring its finances.
Russia’s military intervention in Syria in 2015 ensured the survival of the Assad regime for nine years, turning the tide of the rebellion.
But the price Putin exacted in exchange went well beyond the strategic naval and air bases his forces built on Syria’s coast to give Russia access to the Mediterranean and allow it to resupply mercenary operations in Africa.
Russia also seized control of Syria’s enfeebled economy, in what its new leaders say was a vast asset-stripping exercise, in order to pay for the aerial bombardment that laid waste to swathes of the country’s urban landscape.
Oil and gas contracts were awarded to businesses owned by the Kremlin-backed Wagner Group of Yevgeny Prigozhin, who died in 2023 when his plane fell out of the sky two months after he led a mercenary mutiny.
But control of Syria’s more lucrative phosphates sector fell to Stroytransgaz Logistics, a company owned by Timchenko, an oligarch believed to be Russia’s sixth-richest man and who has been under Western sanctions since 2014.
Syria has among the world’s largest reserves of phosphates, a vital ingredient in fertiliser production, and Stroytransgaz secured the entire supply chain – from mines near the ancient city of Palmyra, to the plant at Qattinah and the port of Tartus.
Mr Kasouha and his colleague Jamel al-Abed, the plant manager, were present when the contract granting Stroytransgaz majority ownership of the Qattinah plant for 40 years was signed. The £170 million investment pledge was the cornerstone of the deal, they said, producing a copy of the agreement.
As representatives of the state-owned General Fertiliser Company, the Syrian partner in the deal, they were aware of how much investment the plant needed. Built by the Soviet Union, Syria’s main backer during the Cold War, in the late Sixties, it was now showing its age.
In 2011, just before the civil war forced the plant to close for five years, Mr Abed had managed to produce 500,000 tonnes of fertiliser – but that was well short of the plant’s 800,000-tonne capacity.
The two men hoped that Russian investment would allow the plant to become a much more vital cog in the economy, supporting not just Syria’s farmers but also potentially bolstering its export economy, too.
Yet it swiftly became apparent that Russia’s main interest was extracting the phosphates and exporting them directly through the port at Tartous, next to Russia’s military base, where Stroytransgaz had a 49-year lease.
The plant itself was allowed to rot. Not a single penny of the promised investment ever emerged. Worse, the Russians refused to pay anything to repair broken down machinery and equipment, preferring to cannibalise parts in order to keep production running.
The only investment Mr Kasouha ever saw the company ever make was when they repainted the offices of the 50 Russian managers of the plant – a redecoration that was not extended to those of their Syrian colleagues.
Basic safety regulations were ignored, with the plant’s 1,500 workers forced to operate in hazardous conditions, employees said.
Output steadily declined, falling to a measly 60,000 tonnes last year. By February, production had ceased entirely.
The plant has been reduced to forlorn and rusty decrepitude. So thick is the phosphate encrusted on the walls of the giant phosphoric acid facility that it has caused the walls to buckle and crumble.
‘New ways to steal’
To make matters worse, Stroytransgaz had taken loans from state-owned banks and had more £100m in outstanding bills for natural gas – money their Syrian former colleagues suspect the Russians never intended to repay.
“For the five years they were here, all they did was think of new ways to steal,” said Mr Abed, the plant manager.
The Telegraph has approached Stroytransgaz for comment.
Aghast at what was happening to the firm he loved, Mr Kasouha would fret over his account books and try to remonstrate with his Russian colleagues. They were scornfully dismissive in response.
“The Russians were just stealing, but what made it worse was that we knew their theft was condoned and encouraged by our own government,” he said. “It left a bitter taste.”
“If we ever protested, they would say: ‘Do you know who we are? We have direct contact with Assad. He always answers when Russians call.”
As well he might. In recent days, fresh evidence has emerged providing a glimpse into how the former dictator collaborated with his Russian allies to plunder the wealth of his nation.
Over a single two-year period, between 2018 and 2019, Assad’s central bank airlifted two tonnes of banknotes with a value of $250m to Moscow, the Financial Times reported last week.
The money is believed to have been used to pay the Kremlin for its military support and to allow the former dictator’s relatives to buy assets in Russia. After he was toppled, Assad and his family fled to Moscow.
As the rebels of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) swept south on the offensive that would topple him, the Russian employees at the fertiliser company fled for Tartus on Dec 1, with the 60-odd mercenaries who guarded the plant following four days later.
Stroytransgaz’s Russian employees at the Port also fled, retreating behind the fortified walls and sandbags of the adjacent base, Syrian security staff at the port said.
Two of the three Russian warships at the naval base have sailed away from the base, while the third could be seen out at sea, patrolling the coastline.
When the Russians left the fertiliser plant, Mr Kasouha said they emptied the safes and took everything of value with them, from laptops and cash to 30kg of platinum – used in the production of nitric acid – with a value of nearly £700,000.
The company is now back in Syrian hands. Abu Hassan al-Khiar, an HTS representative at the site, says he is working with civil servants at the ministry of industry to ensure that salaries are paid this month and that plans are drawn up for the resumption of production.
“The former owners of this facility, like the former owners of this country, operated solely for their own benefit rather than for the benefit of the Syrian people,” he said. “We will rebuild this plant like we will rebuild the economy.”
