Investments for Marota City, while formally coming from the state-owned Commercial Bank of Syria, are widely believed to include regime-linked billionaires such as Rami Makhlouf, a cousin of Assad "who hails from the same family as the minister of local administration and is known to sponsor loyalist militias", and a wealthy Kuwait-based Syrian investor named Mazen Tarazi, according to IRIN News' Aron Lund.