November 2000

Update: Syria

Due to the lack of Internet infrastructure for web hosts in the country, most Web 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 web sites belonging to institutions or agencies within these establishments.

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

(**) The latest created web site is that of the Damascus University (www.damscusuniversity.edu)

(***) 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.

Other public sector web sites are being set-up 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, Aleppo University and the Syrian Arab Organisation for Standardisation and Metrology.

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, and the Syrian Computer Society (SCS), which recently opened subscription to its members and university professors. Thus, there is no possibility of having Internet web servers except at STE and at SCS. Given these limitations, STE cannot handle requests for creating web sites on their servers, and SCS is constrained to limit their services to its membership and university professors, thus cannot host web sites

For the above-mentioned reasons, all web servers regarding Syrian institutions (public and private), except that of STE and very soon that of SCS, are hosted outside the country. This is the major difficulty facing any establishment that would like to create a web site. Other obstacles are the limited local expertise in creating 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 audience abroad have made concrete steps towards establishing web sites.

It is expected however that a boom in web sites will take place with the expansion of the Internet, once implementation of the national Internet backbone is completed (probably in the first quarter of 2001). When that backbone becomes available the Ministry of Education intends to have a web site in addition to nearly 2000 Internet access points in public schools around the country.