HASAKAH, Syria (North Press) – Every morning, before the sun fully rises over Hasakah Governorate, northeastern Syria, dozens of men gather at the entrance of al-Aziziyah neighborhood in Hasakah city, waiting for a job that may never come.
Some are young men at the start of their working lives. Others are fathers and older laborers who have spent decades moving between construction sites and daily wage jobs. Increasingly, among them are holders of secondary-school and university degrees, driven into the city’s informal “workers’ market” by a worsening economic crisis and a severe lack of stable employment.
Mohammed al-Abd, a young man from eastern Guweiran neighborhood, told North Press he arrives at the market at 7 a.m. every day and often remains there until late afternoon in hopes of being hired for one day of work.
“I come here from 7 AM until 4 PM, and I may only find work one day a week,” he said.
Al-Abd added that many of those standing in the market hold educational certificates but have found no jobs matching their qualifications, forcing them to accept any available manual labor. Rising fuel prices, weak economic activity and the shrinking number of job opportunities have pushed many residents toward the day labor market as a last resort, he added.
The hardship, he said, is no longer limited to young people.
“There are men over 60 here doing excavation and physically exhausting jobs just to provide for their families,” al-Abd noted. “Need has forced everyone to cling to any work opportunity, no matter how hard it is or how low the pay.”
For many in Hasakah, the market has become a daily symbol of an economy that can no longer absorb its workforce.
Decades of waiting
Abdulhamid Suleiman, 55, said unemployment in the area is not a recent development but the result of long years of marginalization, corruption and the absence of genuine job opportunities.
He told North Press that he registered with Social Affairs Directorate in 1990 and repeatedly applied for public employment, but never secured a job. After decades of working in construction and other physically demanding jobs, he still stands in the labor market every day searching for temporary work.
“Debt has become part of our lives,” he said, explaining that irregular income and soaring living costs forced him to borrow repeatedly to cover household expenses.
Suleiman added that the governorate urgently needs projects capable of generating real employment and reviving local markets, instead of leaving workers exposed to the scorching summer heat and winter cold while they wait for employers to pass by.
In another corner of the market, 60-year-old Ezzedine al-Khalif described the workers’ reality as a direct consequence of scarce job opportunities and collapsing purchasing power.
He said that many laborers spend hours waiting, only to return home empty-handed. Even when work is available, the wages often fail to match either the physical effort required or the cost of daily life.
“People rush toward any opportunity because they need it,” he added, criticizing what he described as temporary charity initiatives that do not address the root problem of unemployment.
Wider crisis across Syria
The scenes in Hasakah mirror a broader deterioration in Syria’s labor market after more than a decade of conflict, economic collapse and shrinking aid flows.
In May 2024, the World Bank said that Syria’s economy remained in contraction and that Syrian households were facing a “dramatic deterioration” in welfare as prices rose, humanitarian support declined and livelihoods continued to erode. The bank estimated that 69 percent of Syrians were living in poverty as of 2022, while extreme poverty had reached 27 percent.
World Bank labor data, cited in 2024 and 2026 datasets, showed Syria’s unemployment rate at about 12.96 percent in 2024, while youth unemployment exceeded 31 percent and female unemployment remained far higher than male unemployment.
In northeastern Syria, the employment crisis is compounded by displacement, repeated insecurity, damage to infrastructure and the fragile state of local services. Recent humanitarian reporting has noted to worsening living conditions in Hasakah and surrounding areas, where families continue to struggle with the cost of food, transportation, healthcare and fuel.
For residents in Hasakah’s workers’ market, however, those figures translate into a simpler daily reality: standing for hours in the hope of securing a single day’s wage.
Between young graduates searching for a first opportunity and older men worn down by years of labor and waiting, the market has become a condensed image of unemployment in the city. Each morning, they gather carrying little more than the hope of earning enough to feed their families for one more day.