April 2000

Update: Syria

Due to the lack of Internet infrastructure for web hosts in the country, most WWW sites in Syria are hosted abroad. This report only counts those web sites that belong directly to the establishments listed in the table below, rather than those web sites belonging to institutions or agencies within these establishments.

(*) Includes four Syrian Universities, Higher and Intermediate University Institutes, and the newly created Higher Institute for Management (established by Presidential Decree Number 4 dated 19 September 1999 and in collaboration with the European Union).

(**) Ministries of: Tourism, Economy, Industry, Agriculture, Information, Justice and Electricity (www.syriatourism.com, www.syriaecon.com, www.industry-syria.com, www.syrianagriculture.org, www.moi-syria.com, www.moj-syria.com, www.peegt-syria.org)

(***) Includes the two National Libraries in Damascus and Aleppo and small libraries within national cultural centres all over Syria. The figure does not include libraries in foreign cultural centres.

The new web sites belong to the Ministry of Information (www.moi-syria.com), the Ministry of Justice (www.moj-syria.com) and the Ministry of Electricity—regarding power generation and transportation—(www.peegt-syria.org). These new web sites bring the total number of ministerial web sites to 7, thus increasing the ratio of those web sites to 27%. All these web sites are hosted abroad.

Other public sector web sites are being built or are available on an Intranet awaiting the possibility of linking them to the Internet. These web sites include those of the Ministry of Construction, the Ministry of Higher Education, the National Library, the Higher Institute of Applied Sciences and Technology (HIAST), the Arab School for Science and Technology, Damascus University and Aleppo University.

Currently, there is only a pilot project for the Internet in Syria with no ISP’s except the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment (STE) which runs the pilot project. Thus, there is no possibility of having Internet web servers except at STE. Given these limitations, STE cannot handle all requests for creating web sites on their servers. That is why all web servers regarding Syrian institutions (public and private), except that of STE, are hosted outside the country. This is one major difficulty facing any establishment that would like to create a web site. Others are the lack of local expertise in building professional web sites and updating them regularly as well as the cost and payment in hard currency. All these difficulties, added to the fact that Internet access is very limited on the national level, explain the small number of established web sites. Only those institutions that aim at audiences abroad have made concrete steps towards establishing a web site. It is expected though that with the expansion of the Internet after the implementation of the national Internet backbone (by the end of this year) there will be a boom in web sites.