Gareth Browne

speaker

160 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 20 Jul

Gareth Browne’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Intelligence from The Economist · A firm Andy: what are new British PM’s plans? · 20 Jul 2026 podcast

Almost two million Syrians have returned to Syria in the last eighteen months.

And some of them have been in places like Turkey, Germany, even Britain.

And they're taking back money and

Thanks to them, there's some small-scale reconstruction that is actually happening.

You know, people go back to a village and they give five or ten thousand dollars to rebuild the school or a mosque or a small medical clinic.

But these two things seem a bit disjointed.

This is where Ahmed El-Sharra, this new president, former Al-Qaeda militants, interesting, unique, bizarre relationship with President Donald Trump, is really something.

Something that many Syrians are betting on, with the backing of the White House, the administration, that international firms can be comfortable and confident in coming to Syria and helping rebuild whatever part of the country it is.

I think that knocks confidence.

I mean, people do need to be reminded that this is still a very unstable country with security threats wherever you look.

Now that could be any number of pro-government militias, it could be the threat of ISIS, which still lingers in the northeastern desert.

Emmanuel Macron touched down in Damascus, and this was meant to be a huge moment for Syria to have a big Western leader arrive in the country and spend a night in the capital.

only for the morning after his arrival to sort of be plagued by these two explosions.

The fact that that can happen when the French president is in town on this historic visit knocks everyone's confidence.

And all this chatter, all this excitement around investor confidence is really knocked when something like that happens.

In the first months after Shara took power, it was really the Saudis and the Qataris who were sort of leading the international interest in business and reconstruction in Syria.

The United Arab Emirates, because of Shara's background in Al-Qaeda and as a jihadist, were much more standoffish.

But now, eighteen months in, it seems like the Qataris are the ones that are really rolling up their sleeves.

They have spades in the ground.

There's a refurbished airport.

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