(JNi.media) Syria’s government imposed a series of taxes on everyday products, including a new tax on shawarma, in order to be able to continue the war effort against rebels and Jihadists. Shawarma appears to be the preferred food through which tyrannical regimes communicate their policies to the populace. In early November, the Gaza Strip’s Hamas government dictated that vendors must lower the price of an order of shawarma wrap to about $2, 50 cents less than its common price. Shawarma vendors in Gaza shut down their businesses for one day in protest against this government intervention in market prices, and, in response, the Hamas government suspended implementation of the decree.

A Damascus resident told AFP that he was being charged 220 Syrian pounds—about $1—for his shawarma wrap, instead of 200, and the vendor told him there’s a new 10% “reconstruction tax” on shawarma.

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The Shawarma is a Middle Eastern meat dish, made from shavings of a block of lamb, chicken, turkey, beef, veal, or mixed meats that are placed on a vertical, rotating spit in restaurants, where they are grilled for as long as a day. The meat shavings are cut off and served on a plate, or in a large wrap known as lafa, while the remainder of the block of meat keeps rotating on the spit.

Other moves on the part of the Syrian government include removing price subsidies for bread, increasing the price of water and electricity, and a special Tourism Ministry tax on restaurants based on the number of patrons they can accommodate.

The regime is looking to raise $300 million for the war effort. Considering the fact that Assad’s forces today control only between 15% and 20% of Syria, that is a tall order for the already depleted Syrian economy.

According to the World Bank, things couldn’t look more grim in Syria. The proliferation of the violent conflict over the past four years has taken a heavy toll on the lives of the Syrian people and created an unprecedented crisis of refugees and internally displaced people. The estimated death toll has exceeded 220,000 people, according to a UN estimate last September. In 2014, half the Syrian population was forced to leave their homes, including 7.6 million internally displaced persons. As of September 2015, 4 million Syrians have registered as refugees with the UNHCR, and are mostly hosted in Syria’s neighboring countries, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, as well as in Egypt and in European countries. More than 12.2 million people in Syria are in need of humanitarian aid, including 5.6 million children. Lack of access to health care and scarcity of medicine have led to a catastrophic health situation. The successive cuts in subsidies on bread have exacerbated nutritional deprivation.

According to the Guardian, when the civil war began, in 2011, President al-Assad’s central bank announced it was sitting on about $18 billion in reserves. A lot of it has apparently been used up since. Since March 2011 Iran has extended about $5.5 billion in credit, but Russia refused to give the Syrians a $1 billion loan.

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