How Putin's friends plundered Syria before fleeing the country

When his Russian bosses and the mercenaries protecting them finally left, Homam Kasouha walked into the plant’s head office and did something he had yearned to do for years.

Lifting Vladimir Putin’s portrait off the wall, he placed it on the leatherette sofa and turned it around so he would no longer have to look at it.

Then, having done the same with the picture of Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s fallen dictator, he went down the corridor, ripping down the adhesive Russian flags stuck to each door.

Mr Kasouha disliked his Russian masters, less for political reasons — though there were those, too — than for what they had done to the fertiliser plant, once the biggest in the Middle East, where he had worked for 24 years.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/putin-friends-plundered-syria-fleeing-180002520.html