The Ministry of Transport in the Syrian regime’s government announced yesterday, Monday, September 9, a 50% reduction in transit fees for trucks loaded with various types of goods from Lebanon to Iraq and vice versa.

It is scheduled to reassess the amendment three months after its implementation to determine the achieved economic feasibility, to decide whether to maintain, reduce, or revert to the previous state.

The decision issued by the ministry includes imposing fees at a rate of 2% on Syrian transit vehicles from Lebanon to Iraq or Jordan and vice versa, while maintaining the current fees on Arab and foreign vehicles on the transit axis concerning the Nassib crossing, and the current fees on Arab and foreign vehicles destined for Syria, according to the agreements signed with them.

Additionally, the fee specified in Decree 25 for the year 2003 applies to Syrian, Arab, and foreign trucks, whether loaded or empty, when crossing Syrian lands from seaports, according to the formula (the weight of the empty or loaded truck, multiplied by the distance traveled in kilometers, multiplied by 2%, and calculated in dollars).

At the end of last March, the head of the Federation of Iraqi Chambers of Commerce, Abdul Razzaq al-Zuhairi, requested the Damascus Chamber of Industry to provide official documents detailing the costs of shipping Syrian goods to Iraq.

This came during a meeting between Al-Zuhairi and the head of the Damascus and Rif Dimashq Chamber of Industry, Samer al-Debs, explaining that the goal of reviewing the actual shipping costs for Syrian goods shipped to Iraq was to bring up the subject and discuss it with the Iraqi official authorities in an attempt to find solutions to reduce these costs.

For his part, al-Debs spoke about the necessity of facilitating the granting of entry visas to Iraqi territories for Syrian businessmen, pointing to the problems of trade exchange between the two countries and the high costs of Syrian goods transit.

On March 8, a member of the Committee of Vegetable and Fruit Traders and Exporters in Damascus spoke about the cost of a refrigerator truck carrying Syrian citrus fruits reaching Iraq, ranging between seven thousand and eight thousand US dollars.

In recent months, Syrian official media repeatedly reported news indicating that Iraq allowed Syrian trucks loaded with exported goods to enter its territories, instead of unloading their cargo at the crossing, an action that began with the spread of the COVID-19 virus in 2020 and has not been lifted by the Iraqi side until now.