When the Aleppo high-rise apartment of Syrian civil engineer Abdulmoez Raouf shook from the earthquake across the border in Turkey this week he was confident the residents would be OK.
“The Soviets built it in the 1970s to house their advisers,” Mr Raouf said by phone from the southern middle-class Sheikh Saeed neighbourhood of the city.
After the 7.8-magnitude earthquake, Mr Raouf went to check on relatives in impoverished eastern parts of Aleppo, where he says most of the damage occurred.
Two days after the worst natural disaster in the Middle East in decades, a picture is emerging of its effects on Syrian regime territory, despite severely restricted media access.
President Bashar Al Assad's regime also restricts the movement of international organisations. Residents avoid giving information for fear of retribution.
The government has been saying the earthquake mainly affected Aleppo, Hama to the south, and other regime areas on the coast.
The disaster has also brought out disparities within communities perceived as loyal to Mr Al Assad and mainly comprising members of his Alawite sect.
Mr Raouf said buildings in eastern Aleppo were especially weak because the former rebel area was a main target of Russian and regime bombing in 2015.
The Russian intervention that year enabled forces loyal to Mr Al Assad to recapture Aleppo, Syria's second city, along with other parts of the country.
“The buildings that collapsed in the east were waiting to fall,” Mr Raouf said,
He said most of them had been built without a permit, or what is called in Syria “ashwaeiyat”: illegal structures lacking engineering standards.
Before 2011, around 60 per cent of all construction of Syria was ashwaeiyat.
An initial assessment of earthquake damage in regime areas by the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs put the number of collapsed buildings in and around Aleppo at 40, and 53 in the coastal Latakia governorate. The organisation reported three collapsed buildings each in Hama and Tartous.
While the report pointed out damage to urban water reservoirs and cautioned that infrastructure could be affected, the destruction appears relatively modest compared with areas outside regime control to the north and west of Aleppo, especially in Idlib governorate, where Turkey holds sway.
In the rural centre of Jindayris, the opposition local council said 257 buildings had collapsed. The town, which is north of Aleppo, has a population of 100,000.
Mr Raouf said there did not seem to be much effort being put into rescuing people in eastern Aleppo.
“You might see the odd army bulldozer here and there with dozens of soldiers loitering around it,” he said.
The Syrian Foreign Ministry blamed US sanctions for what it described as a lack of equipment and medicine to deal with the earthquake.
While Idlib, Hama and Aleppo are stigmatised Sunni regions because many of their residents took part in the 2011 revolt, the governorates of Latakia and Tartous have large proportions of Alawites, who have been dealt an uneven hand by the disaster.
Leila, a kindergarten teacher in Latakia, said most of the damage in the city appears to have occurred in ashwaeiyat districts.
She moved a decade ago from a modest dwelling to a new residential property built by her wealthy husband.
“I hate to think what would have happened if we had stayed there,” she said.
Signs of discontent with the regime have emerged in outlying areas in the past few years, particularly among Alawites who have not seen windfall profits from the war economy, such as a multibillion dollar narcotics trade.
They have been hit by massive purchasing power decline, due to the collapse of the Syrian pound.
The currency is trading at 7,150 pounds to the dollar, the same rate as on Sunday, the day before the earthquake. But it was at 50 to the dollar on the eve of the outbreak of the conflict in March 2011.
A Facebook news page on Jableh, a coastal city south of Latakia, showed photos of Russian forces bringing in a crane to lift rubble from a collapsed building.
The Russian military is based in Hmeimim, on the outskirts of the city.
“What took them so long to get there?” one resident said of the pictures, in one of many expressions of anger in regime areas about slow relief efforts.
Across pro-regime social media channels, there were pictures of collapsed buildings on the coast with appeals for aid.
Jumaa Al Harer, another resident of Jableh, said the authorities had not yet dispatched any engineers to advise people whose dwellings remained standing on whether they could return inside.
The municipality, he said, is “only good at cleaning the streets when officials in their luxury cars come for visits”.
The earthquake killed at least 2,032 people across Syria. Sixty per cent of them were living in areas not under regime control.
An unemployed man in Latakia said deficiencies in the relief efforts were glaring, even in core regime areas.
He was fired from his government job last year for criticising the regime for not delivering on promises of reconstruction and economic revitalisation.
“There is no state in Syria,” he said. “The earthquake just made it more obvious.”
New UK refugee system
- A new “core protection” for refugees moving from permanent to a more basic, temporary protection
- Shortened leave to remain - refugees will receive 30 months instead of five years
- A longer path to settlement with no indefinite settled status until a refugee has spent 20 years in Britain
- To encourage refugees to integrate the government will encourage them to out of the core protection route wherever possible.
- Under core protection there will be no automatic right to family reunion
- Refugees will have a reduced right to public funds
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
Jetour T1 specs
Engine: 2-litre turbocharged
Power: 254hp
Torque: 390Nm
Price: From Dh126,000
Available: Now
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
The specs: Aston Martin DB11 V8 vs Ferrari GTC4Lusso T
Price, base: Dh840,000; Dh120,000
Engine: 4.0L V8 twin-turbo; 3.9L V8 turbo
Transmission: Eight-speed automatic; seven-speed automatic
Power: 509hp @ 6,000rpm; 601hp @ 7,500rpm
Torque: 695Nm @ 2,000rpm; 760Nm @ 3,000rpm
Fuel economy, combined: 9.9L / 100km; 11.6L / 100km
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ULTRA PROCESSED FOODS
- Carbonated drinks, sweet or savoury packaged snacks, confectionery, mass-produced packaged breads and buns
- margarines and spreads; cookies, biscuits, pastries, cakes, and cake mixes, breakfast cereals, cereal and energy bars;
- energy drinks, milk drinks, fruit yoghurts and fruit drinks, cocoa drinks, meat and chicken extracts and instant sauces
- infant formulas and follow-on milks, health and slimming products such as powdered or fortified meal and dish substitutes,
- many ready-to-heat products including pre-prepared pies and pasta and pizza dishes, poultry and fish nuggets and sticks, sausages, burgers, hot dogs, and other reconstituted meat products, powdered and packaged instant soups, noodles and desserts.
MATCH INFO
Newcastle 2-2 Manchester City
Burnley 0-2 Crystal Palace
Chelsea 0-1 West Ham
Liverpool 2-1 Brighton
Tottenham 3-2 Bournemouth
Southampton v Watford (late)
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
PROFILE OF STARZPLAY
Date started: 2014
Founders: Maaz Sheikh, Danny Bates
Based: Dubai, UAE
Sector: Entertainment/Streaming Video On Demand
Number of employees: 125
Investors/Investment amount: $125 million. Major investors include Starz/Lionsgate, State Street, SEQ and Delta Partners
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The BIO:
He became the first Emirati to climb Mount Everest in 2011, from the south section in Nepal
He ascended Mount Everest the next year from the more treacherous north Tibetan side
By 2015, he had completed the Explorers Grand Slam
Last year, he conquered K2, the world’s second-highest mountain located on the Pakistan-Chinese border
He carries dried camel meat, dried dates and a wheat mixture for the final summit push
His new goal is to climb 14 peaks that are more than 8,000 metres above sea level
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Russia's Muslim Heartlands
Dominic Rubin, Oxford
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Living in...
This article is part of a guide on where to live in the UAE. Our reporters will profile some of the country’s most desirable districts, provide an estimate of rental prices and introduce you to some of the residents who call each area home.