Syrian Subsea Cable Link Downed in Latest Act of Telecom Sabotage
Summary
Syria’s internet recently faced a significant disruption after the Aletar fiber cable was sabotaged on land, a move consistent with a broader pattern of infrastructure attacks targeting the country since the 2024 change in government. This post examines the impact of the cut, the ongoing threat of telecom sabotage, and the evolving state of Syrian internet infrastructure under the country’s new leadership.
Last week, Syria’s internet suffered its latest blow when it lost connectivity from one of its submarine cables due to an act that Syrian Telecom claimed was part of a ”systematic sabotage campaign” targeting the country’s infrastructure since the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024.
In this post, we examine the impact of the cut and its rapid restoration, the prospect of ongoing telecom sabotage in Syria, and the state of the Syrian internet under President Ahmed al-Sharaa, the country’s new leader and former head of HTS, al-Qaeda’s onetime Syrian affiliate.
What happened?
At 18:51 UTC on June 14, a reported fiber cut took out Syria’s access to the Aletar submarine cable. Built in 1997, the Aletar is Syria’s oldest submarine cable. Running to Alexandria, it gives Syria access to the international transit capacity concentrated in Egypt.
While initially reported as a submarine cable cut, pictures posted on Syrian Telecom’s Facebook page made clear that someone had sawed through a fiber optic cable in a manhole, likely connecting this particular subsea cable to the national backbone. This act of sabotage, as Syrian Telecom called it, occurred on land and not at sea — an important distinction as submarine cable sabotage has recently become a hot topic in many parts of the world, especially following a series of submarine cable cuts in the Baltic Sea.
While it didn’t take out all of Syria’s international connectivity, it did cause a significant disruption. From a traffic standpoint, we observed a 22% drop in traffic to Syria in bits/sec at the time of the cut, pictured below.
Service was restored nearly 50 hours later at 20:51 UTC on June 16 — a recovery time more consistent with a terrestrial fiber cut than a subsea break, which would require dispatching a cable repair vessel and potentially waiting weeks for a fix.
If we isolate the traffic going to Syrian Telecom (AS29386) via only Telecom Egypt (AS8452) or PCCW (AS3491), the loss of the Aletar is far more dramatic.
The cut was also visible in BGP, though Syria’s routes stayed online throughout. Rather than outright withdrawals, what we saw were transit shifts as routing moved away from the affected path.
The graphic below shows the transit shifts visible in BGP for three prefixes transited by Syrian Telecom. In each case, they failover to a different transit provider of Syrian Telecom: CYTA (AS6866) in Cyprus, Orange Jordan (AS8697), and Telecom Italia Sparkle (AS6762), respectively.
The threat of telecom sabotage
Syrian Telecom’s claim of sabotage should not be surprising. Since the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, groups loyal to the ousted leader have been working to undercut the new government by intentionally damaging the country’s infrastructure, including telecommunications.
The Aletar and Berytar cables land at Tartous, while Syria’s other major cable, the Ugarit, lands at Latakia. These two coastal governorates make up the heartland of Syria’s Alawite community and the epicenter of Assad loyalist resistance since his fall. It was this coastal region that was the site of a bloody clash between Assad-linked fighters and Syrian government forces last March.
Just weeks after the change in government, in January 2025, saboteurs cut the fiber optic lines between Damascus and Homs, causing the entire country to lose access to the internet for several hours. Then in March 2025, saboteurs struck again, severing fiber optic lines and taking Syria offline a second time.
Over a decade ago, I wrote a blog post for Dyn Research responding to the sensational claim that a Russian submarine was threatening Cuba’s new submarine cable. Setting aside the fact that damaging that cable would have only degraded service to the former Soviet client state, the topic of submarine cable sabotage is very much with us today.
In that 2015 post, I wrote:
The thing that might not be widely appreciated is the fact that telecom lines are also sabotaged with some regularity. Perhaps the most relevant incident to this discussion involved divers who were arrested by the Egyptian Navy in March 2013 for detonating underwater explosives off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt, ostensibly in an attempt to scavenge for scrap metal.
The incident damaged SeaMeWe-4, causing major disruptions to internet service across the Middle East and South Asia. But sadly, there are numerous other examples of telecom sabotage, motivated by various reasons. The sabotage of fiber optic lines in California earlier this year is a mystery that the FBI is still investigating. Similar sabotage of fiber lines occurred in Arizona earlier this year. In the African country of Gabon, saboteurs cut service from that country’s submarine cable in both March and April, apparently over a labor dispute between Gabon Telecom’s workers and their new owners.
In eastern Libya, the landing station for the Silphium submarine cable was blown up in 2013. Yemen has seen numerous acts of sabotage in recent years, while Colombia suffered a major telecom sabotage incident back in January. In addition, Bangladesh, Kenya, and Nigeria have also had their own incidents of telecom sabotage.
While terrestrial sabotage of telecommunications lines is not a rare event (in Syria or elsewhere), confirmed cases of sabotage at sea are still very few and far between. The International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC) is the world’s leading organization promoting submarine cable protection and resilience, and its Media Enquiries & Frequently Asked Questions page states, “anecdotally we believe that there have not been verified incidents of state-sponsored sabotage since World War II.”
Ongoing challenges for Syrian internet
Last December, I published a long-form article in Syria Untold on the experiences of a Syrian telecom engineer during the country ’s civil war. The story spans his brief imprisonment by ISIS to his role implementing the first internet shutdowns for student exams, and the broader struggle to keep the country connected through extraordinarily difficult circumstances.
While Bashar al-Assad remained in power, the northern region of Idlib had become a destination of last resort for Syrians who resisted his rule, the result of a series of “evacuation” deals where opposition fighters and civilians from other areas (Aleppo, Eastern Ghouta, Daraa, etc.) were bused to Idlib after those areas fell to Assad’s forces.
Over time, this final stronghold of anti-Assad forces developed their own internet infrastructure that ran through neighboring Turkey to the north instead of the main Syrian Telecom network. With Assad gone, merging the two pieces of Syrian internet has been difficult.
The Idlib network was an ad hoc creation slapped together to serve those who had fled the government. Merging this network with Syrian Telecom poses difficult technical challenges.
Merging the Idlib network, an ad hoc creation slapped together to serve the internally displaced, with the infrastructure of Syrian Telecom poses difficult technical challenges. Compounding the situation is the lingering distrust many engineers on either side of the divide feel about their counterparts.
But there is hope.
The new Syrian government has recently announced the SilkLink project to lay 4,500 kilometers of new optical fiber and position Syria as a digital corridor between Asia and Europe, while the more near-term Ugarit 2 project, launched in May 2025 in partnership with American telecom company UNIFI and Cyprus’s CYTA, aimed to double Syria’s internet capacity.
The government has also encouraged the development of licensed “Wi-Fi outdoor” micro-ISPs, allowing citizens to fill connectivity gaps left by the civil war’s destruction of Syrian Telecom’s infrastructure. There is some concern, however, that the proliferation of these alternatives could inadvertently incentivize further sabotage of the cheaper Syrian Telecom service in areas where both options are present.
And in a small but symbolic step, the Syrian Ministry of Communications announced, with an infographic centered on the image of a student taking an exam, it will end the practice of shutting down the internet during national exams, a practice I first documented in 2016.
