President Assad appearing on Syrian currency for the first time

DAMASCUS, Syria (Kurdistan24) – For the first time since taking power, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is appearing on the country’s official currency.

His portrait can be seen printed on a new 2,000-pound banknote which went into circulation on Sunday, according to Reuters.

The portrait is one of the several changes to new Syrian banknotes printed years ago but whose distribution was delayed “due to the circumstances of the war and exchange rate fluctuations.”

Citing wear and tear of the existing notes, Central bank governor Duraid Durgham said the time was right to put the new note into circulation, the state news agency SANA reported.

However, the new 2,000-pound note displaying President Assad’s portrait also happens to be the highest denomination of the Syrian currency. Previously, the highest was the 1,000-pound banknote featuring the late President Hafez al-Assad, who died in 2000 and who still appears on coins.

The new note is equal to around $4USD under the current exchange rates. The Syrian pound used to be valued at 47 pounds to the dollar in 2010, before the start of the civil war, and now sits at 500 pounds to the dollar.

After six years of conflict, Syria’s economy has collapsed by 75 percent, dragging the beleaguered economy to its early-1990s size. A Business Monitor International (BMI) Research team forecasts that the Syrian economy will shrink by an average of 3.9 percent annually from 2016 to 2019.

Syria has lost an estimated 4.8 million citizens who are now refugees in Europe and elsewhere in the region, and another 6.6 million people have been displaced within Syria, according to UN numbers