25 Piastres

Syria in 1942 was under Free French administration following the Anglo-French campaign against Vichy forces the previous year. The currency apparatus remained tangled between the Banque de Syrie et du Liban — a private French concessionary institution — and the political reality of a nominally independent Syrian Republic that had been proclaimed in 1941 but exercised little actual sovereignty. Notes of this period carry that ambiguity directly: the issuing authority is Syrian, but the financial infrastructure behind it was still French-controlled.

Bradbury Wilkinson handled production in London, a common arrangement for colonial and mandate territories whose local printing capacity was nonexistent or disrupted by wartime conditions.