Animal Death As National Debility: Climate, Agriculture, and Syrian War Narrative

Animal Death as National Debility: Climate, Agriculture, and Syrian War Narrative

Neel Ahuja

New Literary History, Volume 51, Number 4, Autumn 2020, pp. 855-874 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2020.0053

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/781687

[ Access provided at 20 Feb 2021 17:36 GMT from University of California @ Santa Cruz ] Animal Death as National Debility: Climate, Agriculture, and Syrian War Narrative

Neel Ahuja

n her memoir The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria, journalist Samar Yazbek frames her memories of the Syrian war as a Iprocess of dismemberment that occurs upon parched earth: “In my mind, I hold a portrait of Syria, but it is no ordinary image. It shows a dismembered collection of body parts, the head missing and the right arm dangling precariously. Then you notice a few drops of blood slowly dripping from the frame, disappearing as they are absorbed by the dusty soil below. This is the catastrophe Syrians deal with every day.”1 If Yazbek’s vision of Syrian dismemberment echoes other gory depictions of wartime brutality that are familiar across geographic contexts, the image of blood absorbed by dry land evokes a particular ecology of violence—a backdrop of drought signifying the deadly force of global warming—which has become common to international representations of the Syrian war. In the construction of Syria as one of the world’s first “climate wars,” animality and debility are conjoined in representations of how climate change produces the mass death of farmed animals and the precarious movements and physical conditions of fleeing refugees. While Yazbek’s depiction of violence gives a close-up view of the Syrian war, a variety of outside observers of the war have more broadly referenced the drought as a sign that climate change has played a significant role in the violence. Given the massive human casualties of the Syrian war—hundreds of thousands dead and over twelve million displaced—the emphasis by outside observers on accounts of animal depopulation underpins the role of climate change in the war, while displacing discussion of the proximate wartime contexts of displacement and death raised by Syrian activists. As such, this essay asks that we pause and carefully consider how tropes of disability and animality work in tandem to sidestep revolutionary critiques of the government and outside interventions in Syria, and what role disability studies and animal studies might play in understanding how the representation of war assembles its notions of the human and the environment. I conclude that while the figuration of the Syrian

New Literary History, 2020, 51: 855–874 856 new literary history

war as climate war appears as a posthumanist redefinition of war itself, the context of such a discourse is informed by neocolonial processes of intervention and securitization that overemphasize abstracted visions of debility and animal death as humanitarian tragedy. As such, the Syrian war offers disability studies and animal studies an opportunity to clarify how liberal visions of the tragedy of disability and the cruelty of animal killing work to obfuscate materialist methods for understanding the entanglements of disability, animal life, and neoliberal forms of warfare.

On Posthuman War Narrative

Given that colonial humanitarian representation suffuses modern war narratives, perhaps it is not surprising that texts and images of the ongoing Syrian war proliferate visions of tragedy.2 Yet to observe the nexus of animality and death in journalistic and academic representation of the Syrian war in the Global North is to also note the management of time itself as a marker of the proliferation of Syrian national debility in the tragic mode. For surely “not only bodies but also crucial infrastruc- tures are being maimed” in Syria.3 This observation has led journalists and other observers to toggle between the spectacle of carnage in the present and the concomitant, retrospective tracking of lifeways into the prewar past, which constitutes a prior moment of wholeness from which to view how lives recede into debility and death against the forces of slow violence. This negative type of representation of the refugee body as tragic will be familiar to disability studies scholars, who, following the work of David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, understand how views of the tragedy of disability perform important narrative work for configuring the loss of mobility and the restoration of the wholeness of embodiment in the novel and other narrative genres.4 In this case, representation of the Syrian war yokes debilitation to processes of mass animal killing. According to this posthuman logic in war representation, climate change accounts for vectors of social and ecological reproduction that are the basis of futurity but that are written out of anthropocentric accounts of the nation. Here, the recalibration of war itself as an environmental process may, for some observers, appear to radically breach borders between human and nonhuman, built environment and living environment, in ways that challenge not only our sense of modern infrastructure as the prosthetic domination of earth by humans, but also the very formation of the political configured narrowly as a human sphere of action.5 A certain type of climate migration discourse, which suggests that drought causes agricultural collapse animal death as national debility 857 followed by mass migration and war, participates in the resulting tem- poral management of war narrative: the wearing down of animal life forms one node of national debilitation. This process demonstrates the interconnectedness of ecological and infrastructural precarity: the war on the “life-support system.”6 I use the distinction between debility and disability advisedly here, as the wearing down of national embodiment does not transform the Syrian war refugee into a subject of disability rights but rather into an avatar of linked ecological and social processes that systematically generate violence.7 In turn, the refugee body is invested in a process of turning from debilitation to the emergence of disabled subjectivity elsewhere, often once the refugee exits the national borders, whether to Turkey or Europe. Yet we must critically examine what it means that the depopulation of sheep, goats, and other “livestock” in Syria—which, along with the loss of wheat yields, is the most widely cited sign of climate change’s contribution to the war’s destruction—is configured as a sign of the demise of the national life support system. The unquestioned state-vision of this formulation that hungry and desperate human climate migrants destabilize the state and society leading to war should be a clue to the overdeter- mined nature of the figures of disappearing livestock and the disabled Syrian migrant. For there is a slippage from politicizing the nonhuman force of climate change to writing the revolutionary subject out of the political struggle over infrastructure. The Syrian dissident Yassin al-Haj Saleh, for one, argues that the movement from colonial discourses that highlight the cultural and geopolitical difference of “the Middle East” to ecological discourses concerning the loss of agricultural productivity and ecological sustainability in the region rhetorically depopulates the land, “making local populations invisible, indeed nonexistent.”8 One sign of this move is the “scandalous” coverage of the Syrian war that obfuscates political struggles under the rhetorical authority of scientific discourse: “There prospers in the United States a theory of explaining our struggle through drought! Four years of drought preceded the revolution and caused it. So it’s not a matter of politics, or of social demands or of a thuggish ruling junta. It’s not what those irrational Syrians think; science says it is . . . drought. But this science is full of politics as much as it suffers from ethical drought.”9 Saleh’s critique of the writing of the Syrian war as a climate war offers a starting point for rethinking the politicized relation of animality and debility. Accounts of the death of sheep and goats in the north and northeast of Syria in climate change journalism and research offer a fraught example of how the posthuman reconfiguration of war as an environmental process connects human and animal precarity into 858 new literary history

a vision of national debilitation. The class and spatial dynamics of this framing contend that the violence of war, and the vector by which the state makes some bodies die, involves debility and desperation of the pe- ripheral agrarian classes, all of which leads them to unleash unpredictable social violence. Climate war discourse depicts environmental maiming in the Syrian context in a manner different from Jasbir Puar’s important reading of Israel’s purportedly “humanitarian” war against Palestine as the expression of a sovereign will to “not let die.”10 In this case, a policy of “letting die” under a climate-induced drought (whether attributed to Bashar al-Assad’s agricultural policy or to global carbon emissions) reaches a breaking point when slow violence against the ecosystem “trig- gers” the reactive fast violence of human displacement and warfare. In this sense, the narratives of environmental migration and war as national debility and death involve an implicit theory of human action where the incidental process of slowly making some species and social groups die crosses a threshold, suddenly transitioning environmental causes into the bewildering realm of human effects. In this essay, I argue against the neo-Malthusian precepts of such a discourse, wherein mobile pastoralists become the avatars of the earth’s blowback against human domination of nature. The end of essay tracks some agro-environmental critiques emerging from the Syrian opposition that rethink land, agricultural policy, and property. They suggest how representations of the Syrian war and its environments can militate against both the spectacle of debility as tragedy and the depoliticization of ecology as deep time.

From Drought to War: The Syrian climate war thesis

The representation of the Syrian war as a process of slow death and debility initially travels through the agricultural lands of the north and northeast, where wheat and sheep meat are depicted as critical food products. One of the most widely publicized climate change studies of recent years is a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2015. Climate scientist Colin Kelley co-wrote the article with colleagues in the fields of international relations and earth sciences. Based on Kelley’s data surveying rainfall patterns in the Fertile Crescent region across North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, the authors argue that the drought in the region that took place from 2007 until 2010 contributed to the outbreak of the Syrian war of 2011. Ac- cording to the study, “In 2008, after the driest winter in Syria’s observed record, wheat production failed. . . . Small- and medium-scale farmers and herders suffered from zero or near-zero production, and nearly animal death as national debility 859 all of their livestock herds were lost.”11 On this point, the study cites a 2010 blog that quotes a UN official in Damascus who claims that rising feed prices led to the deaths of 80 percent of sheep herds.12 The link of this supposed mass depopulation of sheep to the resulting migration pathways is left without explanation. The authors frame drought and the resulting struggles of small farmers and pastoralists as a trigger event for rural-to-urban migration, which they argue brought about the conditions for protest and conflict. Furthermore, the authors assert that decades of Syrian agricultural policy that overused subsurface water resources and created unsustainable dependency on water importation made the events of the beginning of the war more likely. Since the publication of “Climate Change in the Fertile Crescent and Implications of the Recent Syrian Drought,” journalists, environmen- talists, and security analysts worldwide picked up the story and began framing the Syrian uprisings and the ensuing war as one of the world’s first “climate wars.” At least two key elements of this narrative require critical reflection here: first, that Syria experienced a mass die-off of sheep in 2009 and second, that declining agricultural fortunes led to internal migration that sparked the Syrian uprisings of 2011. Parched wheat and sheep were the initial signs of the emergent human crisis according to this narrative. The National Geographic article announc- ing the study reported that “water shortages in the Fertile Crescent in Syria, Iraq, and Turkey killed livestock, drove up food prices, sickened children, and forced 1.5 million rural residents to the outskirts of Syria’s jam-packed cities—just as that country was exploding with immigrants from the Iraq war.” The article concludes that the agricultural collapse and resulting migrations helped “trigger a civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people.”13 Several other publications explor- ing the effects of climate change in the region or the causes of Syrian transnational migration noted the specific importance of sheep or other livestock to the declining fortunes of pastoral economies in the leadup to the war. International Studies scholar Hussein Amery argues that decreased rainfall affected pasturelands, which in normal years receive “enough rain to support rain-fed farming and pastureland for sheep and goat herders.”14 Although the drought, poor access to feed, and the collapse of rural economies did indeed result in declining sheep populations at this time, the extent of the losses remains unclear. The sharp decline in owner- ship in sheep, cattle, and goats was significantly affected by increased sales, raids of agricultural lands, and slaughter during the war.15 But a widely circulated Washington Post interview with researchers for the Center for Climate and Security echoed the PNAS figure, stating that 860 new literary history

80 percent of small- and medium-scale herders in northeastern Syria lost their entire flocks.16 Various NGO reports—including a key one by the Environmental Jus- tice Foundation—also advertised this 80 percent livestock loss figure, at times citing a Red Cross assessment that only surveyed areas surrounding three northeastern municipalities in late August and September 2009.17 The Red Cross report does not offer details of how this figure was determined.18 Although these publications often suggest that such factors contributed to the rural-to-urban migration of 1.5 to 2 million Syrian agriculturalists, which set the stage for urban uprisings, the Red Cross report places the affected number of herders in the tens of thousands. The difference in scale between broad claims of millions of Syrian farmers losing their livelihoods and actual accounts of specific losses in the thousands should give us pause about how climate migration discourse has glossed over the specific situation of sheep and other animals during the war. Why exaggerate the scale and speed of animal death? A Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations study claims that rural herders did not abandon their flocks in Syria until after the war began in 2012.19 Furthermore, available studies thus far indicate that rural pastoralists tended to engage in political protest in home locations, not subsequent to migrating.20 As such, claims that loss of wheat yields or sheep herds led directly to political protests at the very minimum need further evaluation. Although there has been a mixed reception of the PNAS study among both climatologists and international relations scholars, reporting on the potential for climate change to cause transnational conflict has only increased in the intervening years, with Syria remaining a key site representing the kind of social breakdown that has become possible due to climate change.21 The story was picked up by major news outlets, including the BBC, NPR, and the Washington Post. It became a topic of editorializing by military officials and climate security experts (such as the CNA corporation, now famous for its reports declaring climate change a threat to US national security). They began to sound the alarm that climate change threatened globally distributed conflict in the twenty-first century. Some environmental NGOs had, since the 1980s, suggested that water scarcity was the cause of resource conflicts.22 However, the PNAS article put climate-induced drought front and center in public debates over the effects of climate change, reaching an international audience of security experts, pundits, and laypeople. Notably, the Syrian climate war thesis, which suggests that climate change creates among mass migration openings for Islamist destabiliza- tion of the Syrian state, recapitulates longstanding orientalist narratives of animal death as national debility 861 rural and southern environmental degradation. It moves between tragic or romantic depictions of climate affected Syrians and tropes of radical- ized migrants overwhelming the cities with violence. In the process, this narrative sidelines discussion of the economic grievances and political critiques of the Assad government that led to the 2011 uprisings by broad sections of Syrian society in the midst of the broader Arab uprisings. The overemphasis on scarcity and on Malthusian precepts of resource conflict in reporting on the Syrian conflict builds on older, racialized narratives of social breakdown caused by the inability of the colonized to properly manage resources. The Syrian climate war thesis thus reifies neoliberal precepts about the purported dependency of rural populations and reproduces a mapping of conflict that configures Muslim-majority states as particularly subject to mismanagement and insurgency. As such, Jan Selby and Clemens Hoffman argue that “most climate security discourse is also indebted to the Malthusian tradition for its core ontological and political premises. Its overwhelmingly environmentally determinist world-view ascribes causal primacy to environmental resources—and especially to presumed resource scarcities—in generating societal stress, breakdown and conflict. Moreover, just as Malthus identified the poor as the main social agents of resource crisis, so contemporary climate security discourse tends to interpret the global poor, and sub-Saharan Africans in particular, as the most likely subjects—and also sources—of climate-related conflict.”23

Disability and the Figure of the Climate Refugee

To understand how animality and debility are linked in Syrian war narratives and images, it is necessary to examine the manner in which accounts of the Syrian war have collected dispersed effects of violence into iconic images of disability. The transformation of widely distributed debility into a recognized subject of national disability is exemplified in the public representation of the photos of the dead body of three- year-old Alan Kurdi, who drowned in the Mediterranean on September 2, 2015 when his family attempted to cross from Turkey to the Greek island of Kos. The images of Kurdi’s body on social media went viral among a broader chain of images and narratives depicting the physical and emotional suffering of the war. It is significant that Kurdi’s body was a refugee body. In highlighting the deathly spectacle of the child drowning on the Mediterranean shore, humanitarian photography offers hope that the offer of refuge in Europe can serve as a corrective to wartime debilitation. 862 new literary history

In journalist John Wendle’s article “Syria’s Climate Refugees,” representation of Syrians in war helps to frame disability within the tragedy of the violence of climate change. Wendle’s Syrians are elliptically connected to the agricultural economy, and after experiencing debility in the forms of loss of livelihoods and displacement, they emerge as disabled subjects as they undertake perilous journeys across Syria and toward Europe. “Syria’s Climate Refugees,” the cover story of the March 2016 issue of Scientific American, announces that “fugitives from Syria’s devastated farmlands . . . represent what threatens to become a worldwide crush of refugees from countries where unstable and repres- sive governments collapse under pressure from a toxic mix of climate change, unsustainable farming practices and water mismanagement.”24 Notably, Wendle places agricultural collapse at the center of the crisis, citing the PNAS study and emphasizing the place of lost crops and livestock in the outbreak of war: “Syria’s drought has destroyed crops, killed livestock and displaced as many as 1.5 million Syrian farmers. In the process, it touched off the social turmoil that burst into civil war” (SC 52). Wendle argues that “drought, which is being exacerbated by climate change and bad government policies, has forced more than a million Syrian farmers to move to overcrowded cities” (SC 52). Despite the large number of farmers portrayed as climate refugees, the story and accompanying photo essay offer only one story of a farmer fleeing Aleppo and one story of a formerly successful well-digger who left the outskirts of Kobane. Their stories are accompanied by a general series of photographs depicting the arrival and settlement of refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos, where Wendle conducted interviews. It is beyond the scope of Wendle’s article to substantiate his claim, which he takes from the PNAS article, that “as many as 1.5 million Syrian farmers” were displaced by the drought. He focuses on the individual story of fifty-four-year-old well-digger Kemal Ali to illustrate the association of climate change and the so-called Mediterranean migrant crisis. Describing how during the drought of 2007 to 2010, the depth of wells that Ali drilled grew from 70 to 700 meters, Wendle finds that this growth was triggered by a declining water table and that this event links a series of economic, social, and physical factors: “Ali’s business disappeared. He tried to find work but could not. Social uprisings in the country began to escalate. He was almost killed by crossfire. Now Ali sits in a wheelchair at a camp for wounded and ill refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos” (SC 52). Representation of disability as tragedy helps Wendle account for the force of climate in unleashing a chain of disruptions in Ali’s social world that cause his family’s eventual passage to Turkey and by boat to Greece: animal death as national debility 863

Ali likewise tried to stick it out, but few of his former customers could afford to drill as deep as the water had sunk. And the war made ordinary activities practi- cally impossible. His home village was only a short distance from the wreckage of Kobane on the Turkish border. That town was in ruins by the time the Kurds succeeded in recapturing it from ISIS, the militant group that has been terror- izing the region. Last July he headed for Syria’s capital, Damascus, hoping to find work and a place where his family could be safe. He was on his way there by bus when a rocket struck the vehicle. He awoke in a Damascus hospital, paralyzed from the waist down. The blast had peppered his spine with shrapnel. Somehow his family managed to get him back north, and together they made their way across Turkey to the shores of the Aegean. (SC 54)

Notably Ali’s paralysis is the culmination of a series of factors—economic hardship, the arrival of ISIS, and the dangerous urban-to-rural migration—purportedly triggered by drought. The slow environmental violence that dried up the water table—and Ali’s business—over the years, according to this narrative, reaches a breaking point when the family must relocate, only to subject themselves to the rapid violence of aerial bombing. Moving from the slowly declining countryside to the rapidly disintegrating city, Ali’s disability emerges at the moment when an ongoing environmental process intersects with the spectacle of armed warfare. Disability here serves as a means of distilling the widely distributed effects of the climate system on affected migrants, as those fleeing war conjoin the specter of mass debilitation under climate change with the intensification of global mobilities. Uniting disabled bodies with hypermobility under conditions of war, such narratives attempt to anthropomorphize the climate system in the bodies of vulnerable Syrian migrants. Although the narrative of Ali’s transformation from successful laborer to paralyzed refugee starts with drought, it is notable that his decision to leave his home comes not with the depletion of his business but later in July 2015, following both the siege of Kobane and surrounding villages by ISIS and, eventually, the June 2015 Kobane massacre in which ISIS carried out a series of suicide attacks. Control was reestablished by the Kurdish YPG forces following a US-led air bombardment that devastated the city. None of these events—which represent more sudden and severe forces of displacement—appear as significant drivers of migration in Wendle’s article. Instead, Wendle emphasizes issues of water and agricultural collapse in producing disability, displaying a photograph of a resting Ali attended by his family members at the Pikpa camp on Lesbos:

Ali and his family are trying to somehow get him to Germany, where they hope surgeons will be able to restore his ability to walk. Outdoors in his chair to get 864 new literary history

a few minutes of sun, Ali is thinking of the friends he left behind in Syria. “The life of a farmer has always been hard,” he says. “Their biggest problem was water—period. Because water is life.” His son wheels him indoors for a rest. Weak winter sunlight partially illuminates a big room lined with a couple of dozen beds. Plastic sacks and cheap duffle bags are heaped everywhere, holding their owners’ few remaining possessions. As Ali’s children lift him into bed, his face crumples in pain and exhaustion. Fardous, his 19-year-old daughter, tucks his colostomy bag against his body and arranges the donated blankets to cover him. “It is written in the Quran,” Ali repeats. “Water is life.” (SC 55)

Wendle ends the article by invoking both the Quran and the phrase “water is life,” which has become an indigenous rallying cry against oil pipelines since Standing Rock activists popularized its translation from the Lakota “mni wiconi.” Inscribing a quranic invocation of protest against the carbon economy, the end of the article plays on a contrast between an environmental ethic and the association of Syria with the rise of ISIS and Islamist insurgent groups. Although it is only implied in Ali’s story, international security discourse on the Syrian war as a climate war draws on the specter of ISIS as climate change’s ultimate challenge to the liberal, secular state system. Elsewhere in the climate security literature, the association is more explicit. In a study commissioned by the German government, the German think tank Adelphi contends that the drought led to both the onset of war and the rise of ISIS and the al-Nusra front. The report relies heavily on the listing of ethnic groups—ranging from Alawites to Kurds to Sunni Arabs—as shorthand for conflicting interests that are present in the society. In this already potent mix of social differences framed by poor state governance, Adelphi claims, “though far from being the only or the primary driver of conflict in Syria, climate change did play a catalytic role in accelerating the descent into fragility and facilitating the rise of NSAGs [non-state armed groups].”25 Emphasiz- ing the role of water and food scarcity, the report claims that ISIS was able to mobilize recruitment of migrant herders: “Farmers and herders in the northeast who were faced with crop failure and livestock death had little to no economic prospects and there were no adequate social safety nets in place for them under the Assad regime. As ISIS pays its fighters an estimated USD 400 per month, about five times as much as a normal wage in the region, it also provides economic incentives for young and unemployed people with few perspectives [sic]. Economic hardship is a primary driver for Syrians to join armed groups, as unem- ployment reaches up to 90 percent and most salaries of those who still have employment are insufficient for meeting basic needs.”26 animal death as national debility 865

Deathscapes and Revolt

Yazbek’s description of the Syrian war as dismemberment, with “drops of blood slowly dripping from the frame, disappearing as they are absorbed by the dusty soil below,” visualizes the recession of life against the backdrop of ecological collapse. Noting the persistent “signs of drought” that left “hardly any signs of life in the landscape,” Yazbek’s descrip- tions of a series of journeys across the western side of the border that separates Syria and Turkey in 2012 and 2013 represent wartime Syria as a place where olive trees shrivel, villagers struggle to eke a living from tending starving sheep, and people shelter indoors, fearing the fate of those who lost limbs, life, and loved ones in the crossfire.27 In her portrayal of her visit to a Turkish hospital at Reyhanli, Yazbek describes “putrefying” bodies lying under white sheets with “mutilated feet, ampu- tated limbs, hazy eyes.” She uses the images of bodily fragmentation to metaphorically depict the dissolution of the society, which is described as the “shattered heart” of Syria in the book’s subtitle.28 The only rain that appears in the narrative is the raining down of shells upon the border region. Yazbek describes the aerial bombing and sniper shelling carried out by Syrian, US, and Turkish forces as an atmospheric violence that represents a “blazing sky,” a “sky that wouldn’t let us celebrate yet; no, the sky was on fire.”29 For Yazbek and some other memoirists of the Syrian uprisings and civil war, this atmospheric violence is not a violence primarily produced by the drought and other climate-driven processes. Aerial bombing and ground battles that intensified with the increased numbers of armed fighters and growing number of regional parties to the conflict are depicted as generating both an intensive toll on the national body and a breakdown of social and ecological conditions for reproducing life. Although such depictions of dismemberment are common to war memoirs in a variety of historical and geographic contexts, the connection between the collapse of social reproduction, portrayals of aerial bombing, and visions of the bodily and architectural fragmentation in war have framed the context of narratives of war and migration in Syria. In Marwan Hisham’s Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War, the winter food shortages in Raqqa are depicted as an effect of the intensify- ing battles over infrastructure emerging as the disparate rebels—among whom included the groups who would reform as ISIS—took over the grain silos in the east. As he waits in a long line outside a bakery in December, 2012, Hisham portrays his internal struggle to make sense of how the twin violences of the state and the rebels, “prison versus anarchy,” intertwine to deprive people of food and energy in Raqqa, 866 new literary history

along with the neighboring “breadbasket” provinces of Deir ez-Zor and Hasakeh: “Surely, this is temporary. It will end when the rebels come. It’s a siege situation. The rebels are going to break through fast and lift it. They care what we think about them. But do they? Aren’t they the reason I’m standing here? Aren’t they the reason these people are behaving like animals? Or not? Some say that the Department of Subsidies is making a profit from this situation and also that the government officials want us to hate the rebels in advance.”30 Whereas Yazbek’s literary prose abstracts Assad’s aerial bombing campaigns as fire in the sky, Hisham’s depicts the monstrosity of the planes that shot “flames from the dragon’s mouth” and emphasizes the personal agency of the pilots, who, disrupting the “calm” of Hisham’s “garden,” “killed everything beautiful in this country.”31 Although Hisham focuses less on sensational images of bodily trauma, his narrative of the war from the blood of martyrs at Raqqa’s clock tower, to ISIS’s public executions, to the US aerial bombing campaigns, to the moment of his exit across the Turkish border near Afrin, focuses on moments when buildings collapse and bullets or shattering glass pierce the skin, leading masses to flee either to the hospital or away from the fighting. The vulnerability of bodies to war environments move from longer time scales—witnessing the slow withering of the population broken down by war—to shorter ones, as sudden explosions generate transformation of the social landscape through sudden migrations. Thus, even though food and water shortages suffuse popular first- person narratives of the Syrian war, the relation between atmosphere and debility in such narratives tends to focus on the spectacles of rapid bombing and gunfire, eschewing the lengthy speculations into a predrought past that frame national debilitation in the Syrian climate war thesis. However, one available refugee narrative works to conjoin a first-person perspective on the war with an account of how drought and the loss of crops and livestock affected antigovernment sentiment and the rise of Islamist militias. As one of the videos in The Weather Chan- nel’s Climate 25 project, Syrian refugee and New America Foundation fellow Farah Nasif gives a short testimonial concluding that “everything changed” with the drought event, provoking public outrage at the government and the eventual rise of Islamism. In the video on the Climate 25 website, which is accompanied by links to media reports on the PNAS study, Nasif concludes that the drought generated individual feelings of anger that led many in the society to reject Assad. Displaying a framed photo of her family’s agricultural land that shows fallow fields and a small group of sheep and goats grazing (Fig. 1), Nasif testifies to the power of the drought to destroy life itself and thus to create hostility toward the Assad government: animal death as national debility 867

Fig. 1. Farah Nasif displays a photograph of her family’s farm near Deir-az-Zour.

We were OK . . . Like any normal family. Everything changed when the drought. . . . Everyone suffered from those sandstorms . . . This is our land. All lands become like this—yellow, completely desert. Nothing, no life, no chance to do anything. I think even the people like my family, we just leave it. . . . Govern- ment doesn’t help us at that time in anything. The drought is one of the main reasons for the revolution. They have that, ugh, that angry, that annoying, that hate for the government, for the Assad government and what he do for them. They said “oh the government doesn’t help me before and I don’t expect any future, so I will destroy it.” Last year I leave Syria forever because the situation is become very horrible. The Islamists become more power, they targeted the women, they targeted the activists, they threaten me, threaten my family, so I was not able even to return back to that part of Syria.32

Here, there is tension in the framing of the revolution as both popular and as determined by climate. Notably, although the drought arose in 2007 and the Red Cross’s report of mass livestock losses in the northeast was published in 2009, Nasif’s family, like Ali’s, actually migrated as conflict intensified and ISIS gained ground in the east in 2013. Sources of violence, such as the actions of regional powers and the US arming non-ISIS Islamist militias, do not appear in the Climate 25 narrative. This video as such reflects some of the ironies and ambivalences of grafting Syrian refugee perspectives onto the climate wars thesis. Nasif suggests that climate change spurred instability and dissent in Syria, yet remains ambivalent about the revolution, emphasizing instead her permanent displacement after the uprisings. 868 new literary history

Beyond Determinism

One issue that arises with international representations of Syrian migrants is that the linkage of embodied vulnerability to state power can configure the Assad government as the ultimate arbiter of security. However, when writing about migration from Syria, northern journalists and policy experts generally avoid reflection on the relationship of the underlying statism of security discourse to critical discourse on Syrian sovereignty, setting aside discussion of the multiple histories of political opposition to Assad and the broader challenges such opposition offers to international systems of state and capital. Between the aerial bombing, urban sieges, and chemical attacks of the Assad government and the violence of ISIS and other Islamist segments of the opposition, international journalists focusing on the Syrian war tend to postpone the ideological questions that activists in the revolution raise. Narratives of climate migration and climate war in Syria avoid confronting the particular struggles within opposition political and rebel mobilization—which vary widely, for example, between the various factions fighting for control of the eastern oilfields near Raqqa and the ecofeminist anarchism of the Rojava autonomous region further north. Leaving an ambivalent view of state power within Syria, such narratives treat disability as an icon of insecurity generalizable beyond Syria, threatening the ability of states elsewhere to contain emerging risks to international order. Despite the persistence of the Syrian climate war thesis and its neo- Malthusian, statist assumptions about relationships between drought, animals, and migration, actual attempts to respond to the conjoined situation of war and drought in northeast Syria have invoked the potential for agricultural collectivity as the basis of a different relationship to land and subsistence. Although much of the international reporting on the Kurdish-led Rojava movement has focused on its articulation of a gender critique that is evident in women’s prominent roles in both local collectives and YPJ armed units, the texts of the movement connect feminist critique with an autonomist vision of ecological resurgence. Be- ginning in 2012, the development of over fifty autonomous agricultural cooperatives in Rojava’s eastern Cizîrê Canton, formerly in the Hasakah Governate of northeast Syria, attempted to establish modes of ecologi- cally sustainable social provision. Responding to the social ecologies of war—including disruptions to basic provision and infrastructure; theft of sheep; munitions pollution; and oil leaks and fires that have significantly affected sheep as well as humans in the region—participants in the Rojava campaign also developed a broader critique of capitalist agriculture.33 This includes a developing concern for recognizing the intentionality of animal death as national debility 869 and responsibility toward animals and the environment, as reflected in the writings of Kurdish dissident Abdullah Öcalan.34 While much of the academic debate over whether rural-to-urban migration in Syria in the leadup to the war was a result of drought-fueled agricultural collapse in the “breadbasket” region, the analysis of social ecology developed by the eastern Rojava activists questions the logics of grain production, which, during the last two decades of Assad’s rule, has been both pesticide intensive and monoculture in nature, helping to intensify the problems of deforestation and desertification that threaten animals, ecology, and long-term food security. For this reason, the communes attempted to supplement livestock and grain production with reforestation efforts and the cultivation of olives and fruit. 35

Conclusions: Animality, Debility, and Decolonial Critiques of War Representation

The neo-Malthusian discourse concerning climate migration emerges at a time when right-wing political coalitions and border militarization already conceive of the world map as a place rife with racialized risk. For settler colonies and former European colonial powers, the specter of increased migration is the cause for new security strategies to manage and contain climate disasters that are increasingly configured as inevitable in the post-Kyoto order. Rather than inaugurating a new materialism of the anthropocene—a new dawn of understanding human imbrication in the geophysical forces of the earth—the Syrian climate war thesis rehearses the oldest form of materialism, which emphasizes how for- mal causes in the guise of nature structure social life. In the process, it dispenses with close attention to how migration is embedded in the forces of transnational capital, US empire, and oil-fueled militarization; visions of animal death and disabled migrants offer a tragic vision of crisis that reinforces northern exceptionalism and views of Islam as a rising transnational threat. The Syrian climate war thesis reflects these developments in Western climate change discourse, signaling that migration will appear as the blowback of the climate system rather than as a product of geopolitical struggles over the region in the wake of US wars, in the subsequent rise of ISIS, and intervention from other regional and international powers. As such, we are pressed to reconsider how animal and ecological figures within posthumanist visions of geopolitics mobilize national debility as a vector of environmental forces. This situation is especially problematic in the context of the representation of refugees as objects of national debility and as potential subjects 870 new literary history of humanitarian refuge. Liberal visions of the Syrian refugee as climate change refugee view the tragedy of debility and death as a prelude to the restoration of humanness elsewhere, a formulation of embodied precarity that evacuates the political struggles inherent in the wartime context. Disability studies scholars have long critiqued visions of disability as tragedy, and in animal studies the commoditization and consumption of animals have been a springboard to understand the co-constitution of human and animal bodies and lifeworlds. Yet here the imperative to understand the war in terms of its effects on animals and through the debilitation of the body makes the purportedly posthuman perspective of climate migration discourse subject to forms of representation that simultaneously evacuate the agency of refugees in the war and use debility and animality as icons of tragedy. Given that opposition discourses include radical ecological and animal critiques, my point in this essay is not simply that animal killing in the Syrian war has been exaggerated and thus the war context is one in which human violences must be evaluated prior to violences affecting other species. Rather, in this context, it is important to highlight methods within the field of animal studies that critically examine certain ethical mandates that have been common in the field, such as an emphasis on veganism or attempts to represent the agency and perspectives of animals themselves. Elsewhere, I have been critical of methods in animal studies that configure the field as an outgrowth of animal rights theories from Britain and its white-majority settler colonies (the US, Australia, Canada, etc) and that insist on attempting to represent “real” animals rather than focusing on figural animals.36 I have recently argued that even though they are concerned with access to food and are thus “human-centered,” the agrarian studies traditions that emerge from decolonization movements are critical for building a more geographically capacious ap- proach to animal studies. I further argue that vegan ethical ideals are being appropriated in rising right-wing political formations, especially in India, in ways that demand a forceful disavowal by animal studies scholars.37 In the context of the Syrian war, in which animal liberation in the North Atlantic sense is actually one of the emergent political projects of the revolution, I feel that the historical tradition of decolonial projects to equitably feed colonized populations nonetheless requires us to understand why immediate questions of provision and democratic governance—rather than ecological or animal ethics—drive the rapid establishment of autonomous agricultural cooperatives in northeast Syria. Thus, we must ask: Why does the (likely exaggerated) trope of mass animal death serve to buttress the idea that the Syrian war is, at heart, a war about climate change? How does abstractly attending to the plight animal death as national debility 871 of animals and the forces of climate change ultimately allow observers from outside of Syria to displace the appeals raised by the opposition for solidarity against both the state and the forces of military intervention? Further, how might ecological projects emerging in Syrian contexts offer a politics of time that is different from the politics of time emerging in northern climate security discourse, one that does not emphasize that the war was fomented by environmental forces set prior to politics, but that sees environmental changes as entangled with forms of neoliberal agriculture and water policy that were already becoming unlivable before the war? The questions raised by the Syrian climate war thesis likely look a bit different from the vantage of disability studies, which as a field has long expressed skepticism of the rendering of disability as tragedy. But the issue becomes more complicated when we consider that journalists focusing on Syrian refugees have attempted to represent the first-person accounts of Syrian refugees like Nasif and Ali. Is not Wendle’s article an example that attempts to represent “disability first,” foregrounding the voice of Ali and others like him affected by the violence of war to recount both the violence of debilitation and the hope for a disabled future in refuge? Thinking about how humanitarian discourse configures refugee voices in ways constrained by the legal framework of asylum, as well as by the purported liberalism of refugee-receiving neocolonial states, critical refugee studies scholarship offers us a clue to how it is not enough in this case to bring the disabled subject into representation.38 Here coming into speech is itself a transition, one that moves from debility to disability in the moment that refuge in Europe grants the refugee access to the means of representation through the northern journalist. In both attention to animal death and to refugee disability, climate refugee and climate war discourses reveal their imbrication in a moral economy of neocolonial representation that takes death and debility as indexes of the threat that environmental change poses to the state- centered order of international security. Yet their engagement with posthuman forms of representation effectively precludes engagement with the complex discourses and political projects of the Syrian context. As such, despite the fact that climate change discourses may encourage us to focus on stereotyped representations of war as debility, it remains necessary for scholars in both animal studies and disability studies to track the work that figures of animality and debility do to buttress my- thologies of the human, including those that construct the human by configuring “environment” as an externalized, final cause of human behavior. By thinking with activists who confront the violence of war and the organization of agriculture in Syria, we may instead begin to 872 new literary history capaciously understand the entanglement of humans and interspecies environments, including how the economic and political organizations of these environments configure embodied differences that are central to the variety of forms of social power that are analyzed in disability studies, animal studies, and postcolonial studies.

University of California, Santa Cruz

NOTES

This essay builds on two prior works: Planetary Specters: Race, Migration, and Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2021) and “Weather As War: Race, Disability, and Environmental Determinism in the Syrian climate war thesis,” Critical Ethnic Studies (forthcoming). 1 Samar Yazbek, The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria, trans. Nashwa Gowanlock and Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp (London: Rider, 2015), 43, 51-52. 2 On the colonial logics of war narrative and the purported “gift” of refuge offered by the colonial or neocolonial state, see Mimi Thi Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refuge Passages (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2011). On colonial humanitarianism, see Lynn Festa, “Humanity without Feathers,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 1, no. 1 (2010): 3-27. 3 On infrastructural maiming, see Jasbir Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Dis- ability (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2017), 133. On slow violence, see Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2013). 4 David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, “Narrative Prosthesis and the Materiality of Meta- phor,” in The Disability Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Lennard Davis (New York: Routledge, 2006), 205-16. 5 Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327-43. 6 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 31. 7 See Puar, The Right to Maim, 72; see further Julie Livingston, Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2005). 8 Andy Heintz, “Dissidents of the Left: In Conversation with Yassin al-Haj Saleh,” August 28, 2018, https://www.yassinhs.com/2018/08/28/dissidents-of-the-left-in-conversation-with- yassin-al-haj-saleh/. 9 Heintz, “Dissidents of the Left.” 10 Puar, The Right to Maim, 139. 11 Colin Kelley, Shahrzad Mohtadi, Mark A. Cane, Richard Seager, and Yochanan Kushnir, “Climate Change in the Fertile Crescent and Implications of the Recent Syrian Drought,” PNAS 112, no. 11 (2015): 3241-42, https:// 3241-42,doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1421533112. 12 “Over a Million People Affected By Drought,” The New Humanitarian, February 17, 2010, https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/report/88139/syria-over-million-people- affected-drought. 13 Craig Welch, “Climate Change Helped Spark Syrian War, Study Says,” National Geo- graphic, March 2, 2015, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/3/150302-syria- war-climate-change-drought/. 14 Hussein Amery, “Climate, Not Conflict, Drove Many Syrian Refugees to Lebanon,” The Conversation, December 3, 2019, https://theconversation.com/climate-not-conflict- drove-many-syrian-refugees-to-lebanon-127681. animal death as national debility 873

15 “Agriculture Becomes Casualty of Syrian War, Incurs Losses Worth US$18 Billion,” Down to Earth, April 10, 2017, https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/agriculture/syrian- civil-war-has-cost-us-16-billion-to-agricultural-sector-57549. 16 Brad Plumer, “Drought Helped Cause Syria’s War. Will Climate Change Bring More Like It?” Washington Post, September 10, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ wonk/wp/2013/09/10/drought-helped-caused-syrias-war-will-climate-change-bring-more- like-it/. See further Caitlin Werrell and Francesco Femia, “Fragile States: The Nexus of Climate Change, State Fragility and Migration,” Angle, November 24, 2015, https:// anglejournal.com/article/2015-11-fragile-states-the-nexus-of-climate-change-state-fragility- and-migration/. 17 Beyond Borders: Our Changing Climate—Its Role in Conflict and Displacement (London: Environmental Justice Foundation, 2017), 46n275; International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Operations Update, Emergency Appeal no. MDRSY001, Syria: Drought, October 27, 2009, https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/43C 302EFCD8806338525765C005DEDAA-Full_Report.pdf. 18 For further discussion of the overestimates of damage to the agricultural sector from drought in the Syrian climate war thesis, see Jan Selby, Omar Dahi, Christiane Fröhlich, and Mike Hulme, “Climate Change and the Syrian war Revisited,” Political Geography 60 (2017): 232-44. 19 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Agricultural Livelihoods and Food Impact Assessment and Response Plan for the Syria Crisis in the Neighbouring Countries of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, March 2013, 7. 20 Fröhlich, “Climate Migrants As Protesters? Dispelling Misconceptions about Global Environmental Change in Pre-Revolutionary Syria,” Contemporary Levant 1, no. 1 (2016): 38-50. 21 Robinson Meyer, “Does Climate Change Cause More War?” The Atlantic, February 12, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/does-climate-change-cause- more-war/553040/; and Courtland Adams, Tobias Ide, Jon Barnett, and Adrien Detges, “Sampling Bias in Climate-Conflict Research,”Nature Climate Change 8 (2018): https:// doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0068-2. 22 See Peter H. Gleick, “Water, Drought, Climate Change, and Conflict in Syria,”Weather, Climate, and Society 6, no. 3 (2014): 331-41, https://doi.org/10.1175/WCAS-D-13-00059.1. 23 Selby and Clemens Hoffman, “Rethinking Climate Change, Conflict and Security,” Geopolitics 19 (2014): 748. 24 John Wendle, “Syria’s Climate Refugees,” Scientific American 314, no. 3 (2016): 52-53 (hereafter cited as SC). 25 Katharina Nett and Lukas Rüttinger, Insurgency, Terrorism and Organised Crime in a Warming Climate: Analyzing the Links Between Climate Change and Non-State Armed Groups (Berlin: Adelphi, 2016), 23. 26 Nett and Rüttinger, Insurgency, Terrorism, and Organised Crime in a Warming Climate, 23-24. 27 Yazbek, The Crossing, 43, 51-52. 28 Yazbek, The Crossing, 8-9. 29 Yazbek, The Crossing, 5. 30 Marwan Hisham with Molly Crabapple, Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War (New York: One World, 2018), 74, 67, 68. 31 Hisham with Crabapple, Brothers of the Gun, 83, 105-6. 32 Farah Nasif, “In Syria, ‘Everything Changed with the Drought,’” The Climate 25, https:// features.weather.com/climate25/project/farah-nasif/. 33 Ali Darwish, “Idlib Faces Economic Losses after al-Assad Regime Re-Captures Most of Its Agricultural Lands,” Enab Baladi (Damascus), July 13, 2020, https://english.enabbaladi. 874 new literary history net/archives/2020/07/idlib-faces-economic-losses-after-al-assad-regime-re-captures-most- of-its-agricultural-lands/. 34 Abdullah Öcalan has made multiple statements on the significance of animal welfare and rights to the Kurdish autonomous struggle, including reflections on the violence of himself killing chickens for food. See Symbiosis Research Collective, “Animal Liberation from Below: Toward a Radical Interspecies Municipalism,” August 6, 2018, https://theecolo- gist.org/2018/aug/06/animal-liberation-below-toward-radical-interspecies-municipalism; and Öcalan, The Third Domain: Reconstructing Liberation (Cologne: International Initiative Freedom for Öcalan, 2003), 26, http://ocalanbooks.com/downloads/the-third-domain. pdf. 35 Internationalist Commune of Rojava, Make Rojava Green Again: Building an Ecological Society (London: Internationalist Commune of Rojava/Dog Section Press, 2018). 36 Neel Ahuja, “Postcolonial Critique in a Multispecies World,” PMLA 124, no. 2 (2009): 556-63; Ahuja, “Notes on Medicine, Culture, and the History of Imported Monkeys in Puerto Rico,” in Centering Animals in Latin American History, ed. Martha Few and Zeb Tortorici (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2013), 180-205. 37 Samantha King, R. Scott Carey, Isabel Macquarrie, Victoria Niva Millious, and Elaine M. Power, “Asking Hard Questions: Neel Ahuja” (interview), in Messy Eating: Conversations on Animals as Food, ed. King, Carey, Macquarrie, Millious, and Power (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2019): 157-71. 38 Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom.