At the onset of the Syrian uprising in 2011, Iran started lending its longtime ally, the Bashar al-Assad regime, through a credit line to help it survive the wave of Arab Spring protests that swept the region. As opposed to lump-sum lending, a credit line implies that the borrower would be borrowing at times and paying back at other times, with the overall amount of debt not exceeding a certain level at any given date. Effectively, it is a credit card for countries. Having that been said, there is almost no possibility that Syria was paying off any of the debt back to Iran as its government struggles to cover its expenses. Looking into Syria’s national budgets over 2012-2016 (see, for instance, the 2016 budget ), we calculate that, on average, 38 percent of Syria’s government spending came from deficit funding by printing more money. The breakdown of revenues […]