Ahmed Al-Hallaq, head of the craft of hand-made glass, and the owner of the last glass-blowing workshop, confirmed that he was forced to close his workshop within a few days, after completing the processing of the last order agreed upon with one of his customers due to the lack of fuel.
Al-Hallaq explained to Al-Iqtisadi website that his furnace, which is the smallest furnace used to make glass in the history of the profession, needs 180 liters of diesel per day, and 5,000 liters per month, indicating that his fuel allocations amount to 4,500 liters per month, but he only received one payment throughout the year. The batch was 4000 liters and he received it more than 3 months ago.
Noting that the price of a liter of diesel on the open market has reached 4000 Syrian pounds, and that in the last batch he bought 3500 pounds per liter, which made him unable to bear the loss if he continued to work, stressing that he submitted many requests to the Craftsmen Association, the Craftsmen Union and the Ministry of Tourism to secure his diesel allocations, but to no avail.
The head of the hand-crafted glass industry added: Despite the presence of customers and foreign orders from “France, Europe and the Gulf states,” the lack of fuel and its high price on the open market caused great losses to the workshop, forcing him to take the decision to close.
The “Al Hallaq” workshop is the last glassblowing workshop for making handmade glass in Syria, and the Syrians are the first to make glass in the world, and this craft later spread to “Italy, Egypt” and other countries.
At the end of 2020, the “Ministry of Internal Trade and Consumer Protection” had raised the price of a liter of free commercial and industrial diesel from 296 SYP to 650 SYP, while the price of a liter of heating and diesel fuel designated for transportation, agriculture and the public sector was raised from 180 to 500 SYP in June 2021.