Syrian President Bashar al-Assad Sunday assigned caretaker Prime Minister Hussein Arnous to form a new cabinet, two months after the presidential elections.

According to the Syrian constitution, the term of the government ends with the end of the term of the president of the republic, i.e. every seven years, and it is considered a resigned government after taking the constitutional oath and turns into a caretaker government.

July 17, al-Assad was sworn in for a fourth presidential term of seven years, about two months after his re-election, in a vote in which the authorities announced that he had won 95.1 percent of the vote, while Western powers and his opponents questioned the integrity and results of the elections.

This is the second time that Arnous has been assigned to form a government in a country that has been witnessing a bloody conflict since 2011.

Al-Assad assigned Arnous, the former Minister of Water Resources, in August 2020 to form a new government, after handing him in June 2020 the duties of the premiership temporarily, succeeding Imad Khamis, who was relieved of his position.

Arnous, 68, hails from the city of Maarat al-Numan in Idlib Governorate, in the northwest of the country. He graduated from the Faculty of Civil Engineering at the University of Aleppo in 1978. He held several positions in government institutions. He was also the governor of Deir ez-Zor and then Quneitra in the south. He was handed over to the Ministry of Works in 2013 and then to the Ministry of Water Resources in 2018.

A difficult task falls on the government's shoulders at a time when the country is experiencing its most severe economic crises, which were left behind by the war and exacerbated by Western sanctions, in addition to the accelerating economic collapse in neighboring Lebanon.

During the past months, the previous Arnous government made several difficult decisions, including raising the prices of unsubsidized gasoline, diesel, bread, sugar and rice, at a time when the problem of electricity outages was exacerbated by the lack of gas feeding for electric power plants, and the rationing period in some areas reached about twenty hours a day.

More than eighty percent of Syrians currently live below the poverty line, according to the United Nations.

Since its outbreak in March 2011, the conflict has killed about half a million people, caused massive damage to infrastructure and drained the economy. It also led to the displacement and displacement of about half of the Syrians inside and outside the country.

After weakening at the beginning of the conflict and losing many areas, the government forces, with the military support of their allies Iran and Russia, regained large areas, but rich areas, including agricultural plains and oil and gas wells, are still outside their control.