In early April, a convoy of 299 Iraqi fuel tankers crossed into Syria on its way to the Mediterranean port of Baniyas, one of the few remaining paths to international markets amid the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. It was the first time Iraqi oil had crossed through Syria legally since 2003, when the U.S. invasion of Iraq effectively shuttered the cross-border flow of oil from Iraq to Syria. In late April, Iraq expanded the route, reopening its northern Rabia crossing with Syria, a crossing that had been closed for more than a decade during Syria’s civil war. Between April and late July, more than 2.1 million metric tons of Iraqi fuel moved to the Syrian coast.

Before Syria’s civil war began, in 2011, the country had served as a commercial crossroads between Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and the Mediterranean, connecting Gulf states to European markets. But after 2011, Syria turned into a different kind of transit hub. Trade became dominated by Iranian weapons and logistics support on their way to Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as fuel, narcotics, and other illicit trade that filled the coffers of the country’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, but provided few benefits for Syrians.

After Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the militant group once led by Syria’s new president, Ahmed al-Shara, toppled the Assad regime at the end of 2024, regional trade began to trickle back in. By August 2025, as many as 327,000 trucks carrying over seven million tons of cargo crossed into Syria, according to estimates by Syria’s customs agency. Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey began to normalize relations and do business in the country. Damascus’s new authorities moved quickly to restore the country’s ties with a wide variety of regional and international partners, with the aim of ending Syria’s economic isolation. Although significant, this is not nearly enough to rebuild the country after over a decade of civil war. In 2025, the World Bank estimated that Syria’s reconstruction would cost $216 billion, nearly ten times Syria’s projected GDP for 2024.

Syria’s leaders are now positioning the country to benefit from a resurgence of regional turmoil. Since the outbreak of the Iran war, in late February, the opportunities for new foreign investment in Syria have proliferated. Because alignment with the United States and Israel and reliance on the Strait of Hormuz carry ever-greater risks of retaliation from Iran, many countries are turning to Syria, which has a variety of well-placed land and sea routes. Syrian authorities are using the potential rush of capital and trade to create a new source of revenue, allowing the state to recast the country’s image from a source of refugees, terrorism, and regional disorder to a transit power that plays a dominant role in regional connectivity. But the speed and scale of investment could also overwhelm the institutions needed to manage it. If not properly scrutinized or fairly distributed, the rush of new investment that seems so promising now may destabilize the country’s fragile recovery.

The need for better and more diversified transit through the Middle East is not new, but for nearly 15 years, Syria’s civil war made transit through the country impossible. In 2009, the Saudi and Turkish governments began discussions around redeveloping the Hejaz Railway route, built by the Ottoman Empire and largely destroyed in World War I, but they abandoned these plans with the outbreak of Syria’s civil war. Between 2010 and 2021, Syrian exports fell by roughly 90 percent. Major transit routes through the country closed entirely as the state fragmented into competing zones of control. In 2023, India, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the United States, and European partners proposed the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor as a way to spur intraregional and interregional connectivity and integrate Israel, a node on the corridor, with its neighbors.

Disruption in the Strait of Hormuz has made expanding these projects even more urgent. In April and June of this year, the Jordanian, Saudi, Syrian, and Turkish governments agreed to redevelop the Hejaz Railway within three to four years. Analyses of comparable regional rail corridors, such as that by the Atlantic Council, estimate that the railway could initially carry around 1.5 million containers annually, potentially rising to three million with track and port capacity expansion. This proposal resonates with Shara’s loose vision, laid out at an informal EU summit in April among leaders from Europe and the Middle East, for a Four Seas and Nine Corridors initiative that places Syria at the center of a network connecting the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea, and the Mediterranean, facilitating ground- and sea-based trade in goods, electricity, and oil. Then, in July, Iraq and Syria agreed to rehabilitate the Kirkuk-Baniyas oil pipeline, which was........

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