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Rivers, , and Drought: Crisis of Water in the

The Evergreen State College A New Middle East? Program Spring Quarter Final Paper Michael Korchonnoff

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Table of Contents

Abstract and Introduction ……………………………………………… 3 State, Culture, Business, and the legacy of Colonialism ………………. 9

Mirages of Conflict …………………………………………………….. 13

Burdens of Responsibility ……………………………………………… 19 Weather, Climate and the Macro-View ………………………………... 25 Shallow Wells in the Deep State ………………………………………. 30 Damming of the and the “Kurdish Question” ……………. 38 The Turkish Position …………………………………………………... 44 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………… 50 Post-Conclusion ………………………………………………………… 53 Endnotes ………………………………………………………………… 58

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Abstract

This paper is an exploration of the ecological influences underpinning the outbreak of war in

Syria in 2011. Although the paper does not attempt to explain the war in strictly environmental terms and in fact takes an explicit stance against such a position, it is argued within that environmental events, or more specifically the drought experienced by the Fertile Crescent region in the years of 2000-2010, strongly contributed to the social upheaval that preceded the war. Space is given within the paper to address different possible causes of the drought and analysis of studies that assert that each one of these elements, being the influence of bad agricultural practices, climate change, and the ecological consequences of large-scale hydroelectric projects on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, are the primary contributors to the drought. It is the position of this paper that all of these are influential contributors, but that the contribution of the massive Southeastern Anatolia hydroelectric project is an overlooked influence that has a history of contention and conflict within the region long preceding the Syrian

Civil War.

Introduction

A Man of Umma who, over the levee of the boundary territory of Ningirsu or over the levee of the boundary territory of Nanshe in order by violence to take fields might in the future cross, whether he be a man of Umma or a man of a foreign land, may Enlil annihilate him!

These words of warning, lifted from cuniform etchings and translated from ancient

Sumerian, form part of the concluding verses of an artifact known as the Enmetena Cone, a stele 4 dating from around 2400 BCE which details a conflict between Umma and Lagash, a pair of ancient Mesopotamian city-states who existed close to the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in a region commonly known to us in the modern era as Iraq. These wars raged for generations over territorial rights to fertile fields and water canals - one account describes the conflict as originating with a King of Umma ordering the drainage of a canal leading from the

Tigris - and the clay tablets chronicling their history as well as the provisions of the treaties between the two cities are considered to be the earliest diplomatic documents yet discovered, perhaps even forming the most ancient of foundations for modern-day International Law, as

Professor Malcolm Shaw has suggested in his written work on this legal field.1 It is most significant to note here that water is the salient object of dispute in this ancient conflict. Water, the foundation of life, once the bounty of the Fertile Crescent that cradled the most ancient of agriculture, whose peoples gifted the first domesticated grains to the human world.

In following the terrible contemporary disaster that has engulfed Mesopotamia's modern incarnation one may see parallels between the ancient and the modern. Although this may seem a bit simplistic of a statement it is undeniable that water, in the vast duality of its simplicity and ecological complexity, is a crucial element of the present-day strife that ensues in , Iraq,

Palestine, and many other places in the region. It is worth noting as well that the land of this region has become more arid than it was four-thousand years ago and the populations of these lands have increased considerably as well, perhaps making its relevance more dire within the context of these conflicts.

The politics of water are inextricably connected to food security, and both of these resources are cornerstones of common welfare and security in society. "Aish, huriya, adala igtimaeya!" was the chant that emanated from Cairo's Tahrir square in January of 2011, a 5 exaltation that challenged Hosni Mubarak's autocratic regime to acknowledge the people of

Egypt's need for "bread, freedom and social justice" in a time when the price of staple foods had multiplied to an untenable degree for the vast number of poor in Egyptian society, inheritors of the very land that had once been renowned as the "breadbasket of the world". From Anwar

Sadat's Intifah, or "opening" of the Egyptian economy to foreign investment to the culmination of the nepotist business monopolies of Mubarak's era, many of the fertile farmlands of the Nile delta that once provided bounties of wheat and other staples for the people of Egypt had transitioned over into cotton plantations for the textile industry, placing the worlds breadbasket in the bizarre situation of becoming one of the world’s largest importers of wheat for domestic consumption. These neoliberal economic reforms undertaken under the guidance of the

International Monetary Fund, coupled with an autocratic corruption that blended the institution of Egypt's military with the handful of major corporations in the nation all contributed to widening the economic class division in Egypt, enriching some in Egyptian society while deepening the squalor of those millions pushed into the fringes of the common wealth. Although the wildfire of popular protest and revolt known as the Arab Spring may have had its iconic spark in the self-immolation of the struggling street-vendor Mohamed Bouazizi whose act of symbolic martyrdom moved the Tunisian people to demand the abdication of Ben Ali, it was what happened in Tahrir Square that may have had the biggest impact in the region concerning the phenomenon of the Arab Spring. Mubarak's fall certainly provided fuel for the burgeoning popular movement that quickly spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa, hastening the removal of nearly every regime with some notable exceptions, these being the rentier-State

Monarchies of the region and the government of Bashar al-Assad of the Syrian Arab Republic, heir to a Baathist dictatorship established by his father Hafez al-Assad that has essentially been a 6 family-run organization since its establishment in 1971. And there certain comparisons that can be drawn between the contemporary conditions of Egypt and Syria, both being autocratic regimes, previously of an Arab-Nationalist Socialist persuasion that originally established themselves within a Cold-War context of struggling to maintain geopolitical autonomy while trapped between the hungry maws of the Soviet Union and the United States, only to later eschew their Socialist schema in favor of a form of western-style capitalism, although the Syrian regime conspicuously abstained from playing this game until the appointment of Bashar al-Assad in 2000, and has maintained a reliably obstinate stance with the western powers.

It would probably not be an exaggeration to say that what has transpired in Syria has long overshadowed the developments that have happened in pretty much every other Arab Spring nation. Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, and even Libya finds themselves footnotes in the media headlines that Syria has come to dominate in the past several years. The original popular protests that took place in cities like Homs and seem phantasmal and distant ancestors of a conflict that has taken on a very global character, as participants of every stripe, be they militant volunteers, foreign militaries, financial benefactors or humanitarian aid workers pour their energies and resources into the Syrian crucible to engage themselves with a bloodbath that has taken on a seemingly intractable and pyhrric character for every party involved -- all while millions of Syrian have been forced to flee their destroyed or occupied homes lest they face death, torture, conscription or any other injustice. But at one point during the flowering of the

Arab Spring, thousands peacefully took to the streets in Sham emboldened by the momentum shared by the region. And the fundamental demands of these original protests were for political transparency, fair elections and economic reforms, all demands that were driven by conditions that were not too far removed from what had transpired in Egypt in many ways. Of course the 7 ways in which the regional character of Syria differs from that of Egypt are tremendously relevant in consideration of how differently things turned out for the Syrian Arab Spring. But is essential to acknowledge that however distorted the image of the revolution may have become in the present day, issues of political representation in vital connection to those fundamental issues of food, water and shelter formed the foundation of the uprising. And in following the sensationalism and death-obsession of the mainstream Western Media coverage of the Syrian conflict it can be easy to lose track of these root causes.

About two years into the horrific morass of the Syrian Civil War certain western news outlets such as the Washington Post, NPR and others ran articles begging the question as to whether or not the conflict may have been precipitated by a drought that had been devastating to

Syria's agricultural sector2, thereby driving portions of the rural population into the cities, coupling unemployment and overcrowding with food shortages -- a toxic mixture that provided fuel for the social unrest that was so brutally suppressed by the government of Bashar al-Assad, sparking of a popular revolution that soon mutated into a devastating civil war. A crucial question that has been asked within this light has been that of the role of climate change in this drought, with some speculating even that the advent of global climate change is itself the primary influence and mover of the Syrian Conflict. It is the position of this paper that such opinions likely do a great disservice to the search for understanding of this conflict and the social unrest that preceded it. Environmental disasters and subsequent damage to critical infrastructure nearly always sow chaos into the fabric of the societies that experience them, but when these kinds of disasters graduate into bloody internecine violence there is always a host of complex factors that lurk beneath the surface. In the case of what has happened in Syria, the outright dismissal these diverse elements as subordinate to environmental factors risks walking a dangerously flippant 8 line, one that is arguably disrespectful to the hundreds of thousands of Syrian dead and the plight of the millions who have fled the inferno to live in the disenfranchised squalor of refugee camps

-- not to mention those innumerable victims of terrible torture, humiliation and other injustices at the hands of the Assad government, Daesh, and the many others in the conflict who have found their humanity suspended in the horrors of war and have become deliverers of atrocity.

All this considered, this paper is primarily focused on the social-ecological background of the Syrian Civil War. The possible influence of climate change is a major subject that will be covered within this paper, but it will be examined alongside other factors. Some questions asked will be how have the water politics of the great Euphrates river and the influence of the Ataturk

Dam in on the flow of this river influenced the agrarian communities of Syria? What was the effect of the Syrian Governments practice of heavily subsidizing grain crops on the heavy harvest losses that preceded the war? The intent of this essay is also to examine the environmental implications of the Syrian conflict in whatever way possible, and this includes both those preceding the conflict as well as those consequences incurred as the conflict rages on.

What may be the prospects and condition of the ecology of a post-war Syria? Alongside an examination of these subjects, space will also be made to address some of the social complexities of Syria as they relate to these issues, in hope that an ecologically-oriented analysis of this terrible tragedy may also incorporate the diverse threads that connect it to history, religion, politics and colonialism, among others. In identifying the specific influences that the environment played on the outbreak of war in Syria (being state agricultural influence, climate change, and hydroelectric dams), it is the position of this paper that all of these elements are relevant influences, but that the influence of Hydroelectric dams have been underrepresented in an the ecological analysis of the conflict. 9

Although categories such as the "social" and the "ecological" are typically quarantined into particular disciplines when researched and written about in the Western academic milieu, it is the intent of this essay to bring into focus some of the ways in which these fields of study intersect, keeping in mind that to those who are experiencing this conflict there is no such defined distinction -- the event is continually experienced as a fully holistic phenomena by those human beings inhabiting its nexus, as all phenomena are ultimately experienced regardless of whether or not their participants are cogniscent of the diverse constituent factors at play within the event.

State, Culture, Business, and the legacy of Colonialism

In bringing the intertwined social and ecological of Syria into view within the context of the war, it would be helpful to examine of some critical aspects of life experienced by Syrians in period between 1973 (when Hafez al-Assad enacted his "corrective movement" and seized power through a coup) and the outbreak of war in 2011. Encapsulated within this broad and multifaceted topic would be the history and role of minority groups in Baathist Syria (notably being the Alawite, Druze and Orthodox Christian communities), the relevance of this history the dynamics of power and governance in the state, the practices of the shadowy deep-State infrastructure of Assad's Syria in relationship to the people and the land of Sham, and how the nuances of this cultural mosaic have morphed and shifted in reaction to the auspices of the

Colonial powers, with their fixation on the physical resources contained within the lands of the

Fertile Crescent. Following from this, and although it is the subject of water that this essay is fundamentally encircling, the modern social and ecological conflicts surrounding the issue of 10 water is deeply connected with that of another terrestrial liquid -- the concentrated hydrocarbons of crude oil.

To describe a brief anecdotal and contemporary example of the issue of oil in the civil war, in the Spring of 2015 the American Anarchist writer Paul Simons (and editor of the Modern

Slavery journal) traveled to the predominantly-Kurdish autonomous region of Rojava in norther

Syria, an enclave bifurcated by territory contested by the imaginative geographies of the Syrian

Civil War, whose expressed intent is to implement the political philosophy of Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned inspiration for and former head of the Turkey-based Kurdistan Workers Party

(PKK) and their Syrian cousin, the People's Democratic Party (PYD). This utopian political- model, dubbed by Ocalan as "Democractic Confederalism" contains within it (alongside a host of other post-Anarchist precepts) a commitment to upholding twin pillars of "environmentalism and feminism", and maintains the perspective of seeing the two issues as intertwined. Simons described the experience of his visit in a speaking tour he conducted in early 2016, in which he recounted stories told to him by residents of Rojava of what it was like living under the Assad government of Syria. One thing Simons describes being told by PYD people and their affiliated

People's Protection Units (YPG) militia members is related to the issue of the oil industry in northern Syria -- once the primary source of revenue for the Syrian Government. According to local Kurdish sources the practices of the oil industry customarily disregarded the ecology of the land. The process of drilling will typically draw the crude oil up and out of its subterranean enclosure to pool up on the surface. In addition to this, groundwater is also collaterally extracted as part of this process, and becomes contaminated both with oil and sulphurous compounds -- with anywhere between three to fifty barrels of contaminated groundwater to every barrel of oil extracted from the earth.2 Oil has been Syria's primary export in the post-colonial era, a 11 nationalized (in a loose sense of the word) commodity that although relied heavily upon for the economic welfare of the State is also one whose bounty steadily declined in dispersion among the people of Syria in a state that supposedly cleaves to socialist principles in its constitution. In

2006 state salaries fell to 5 percent in comparison to the 20% increases that had been implemented between the years of 2002 and 20044, prices of gasoline increased at an expense of twenty-percent for the average Syrian citizen, and the value of the Syrian pound ran at an estimated increase of fifteen percent.

Oil -- referred to occasionally with the wryly noir moniker of "black gold" -- has had a massive influence on the events that have transpired in the modern history of the Middle East.

The Sykes-Picot agreement that demarcated the political boundaries of the post-Ottoman Middle

East happened to coincide with a critical period in which oil was rapidly replacing coal as the carbon fuel of choice, a transition that was accelerated by Europe's wartime amplification of industry. From the Machiavellian corporatist politics that surrounded the construction of pipelines running from the Mesopotamian oil fields to the Mediterranean coast, to the deep alliance forged between the Saudi monarchy and the government of the United States in the twilight of the Second World War, the concentrated-carbon capital of oil has for over seventy years been the driving motivator behind the geopolitical pincer clenching down on the peoples of the Middle East from all directions. Although Syria is not necessarily the foremost in oil- producing States, and certainly not one fraught with the same kind of relationship with the west shared by the Gulf Monarchies, or in a more turbulent sense by places such as Iraq or Iran, this

Colonial heritage is intrinsic to Syria's national history. As John McHugo writes in his 2014 book Syria: A History of the Last Hundred Years, "the effect of the actions of outside powers on

Syria over the last century cannot be overlooked. The country's borders were decided by France 12 and Britain in the immediate aftermath of the Great War. Those two nations thus took upon themselves the momentous responsibility of deciding who was -- and who was not -- a Syrian."3

The same colonial dynamics of this demarcation continue to play out in the complex rapport the people of Syria experience with their neighbors in Lebanon (which was originally part of

Ottoman Syria), Iraq, Turkey, and Israel -- whose militarist expansionism in the 1967 "Six Day

War" forced tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs into exile in Syria, many of whom continue to reside with their descendants in the national purgatory of the Yarmouk Camp in Damascus, periodically entrapped between various opposing factions in the war.

The syndicalized and familial patronage-driven characteristics of private industry and governing station in Assad's Syria draw to mind parallels of criminal organizations in some ways. Although one set of practices may be implicitly State-sanctioned and the other a breach of legality through institutionalized corruption in local government, this story of the abusive environmental practices on the part of Syria's oil industry draws into mind a comparison with the waste management crisis that occurred in the Campania region of southern Italy in which the

Camorra, a very old and well-established organized-crime syndicate with embedded inter- familial ties between members and deep networks of patronage not entirely unlike that of the

Baathist regime, were largely responsible for an environmental disaster in Southern Italy through their eschewing of proper disposal of toxic chemical waste in favor of simply dumping it into landfills. The Camorra were granted contracts by the local government to handle the garbage disposal in Naples and elsewhere, and in obtaining these contracts were afforded the privilege of conducting business without regulatory oversight in exchange for offering the contracts at an eighty-percent discount. Now these kinds of examples of systemic corruption are by no means unique to locales like Naples or Damascus, but the point of this kind of comparison would be an 13 suggest that purely feudal systems of patronage in governing authority where power and privilege are awarded depending on one's condition of family, status and loyalty, more often than not lead to degradation and oppression, whether they be societal, economic or ecological. Herein and within the context of modern industrialism, the tyranny of nepotism and despotism manifests itself in environmental exploitation and degradation, and without material alternatives to alleviate the struggle for survival, it is no stretch of the imagination to conceive of social unrest or even armed revolt as consequences of these kinds of conditions.

Mirages of Conflict

"We don't believe in Sykes-Picot", states an Islamic State fighter to the camera in a scene featured in the controversial VICE News episode on the militant organization, which made its debut in 2014, the same year in which Daesh made its explosive territorial conquests and elevated its brand of armed Jihadism to the forefront of world awareness. Although the particulars of colonial history in the Middle East are well known to those insurgent revolutionaries fighting in Iraq and Syria who seek to remake the national boundaries of the region and unravel the weave of Europe's post-colonial legacy, to many thousands of viewers of the VICE episode in the United States this was likely the first time they had ever heard of the

Sykes-Picot agreement, thereby finding themselves in the strange position of receiving a history lesson from a designated terrorist via an alternative press newscast plastered onto YouTube.

Contained within this is an example of the frequently-veiled (and often insidious) characteristics of how historical narratives typically play out in the media. In absorbing the most common kinds of news disseminated throughout the mainstream American media concerning the present 14 conflict in Syria, the heritage and consequences of European Colonialism don't come up all that often. And even as the shadow of the Sykes-Picot agreement begins to creep into the focus of the story (as seen in the VICE episode), little attention is given to the history or context of sectarianism and economic class-divides, and what roles the colonial governing apparatuses of

France, Great Britian, and to some extent the played in agitating and encouraging these divisions in Greater Syria.

Now it is not the intent of this paper to comprehensively dissect the ethno-religious mosaic of this region nor to specifically analyze all of the dynamics of sectarian conflict as it relates to what is currently occurring in Syria. But in acknowledgement of how the social and the ecological intersect and respectively shape one another, it is of absolute relevance to spend some time examining the identities, roles and modern history of the numerous communities of what we will call Greater Syria, the region encompassing the modern states of Syria and Lebanon.

Sectarianism -- the term perpetually surfaces in the rhetoric of opinonists and pundits as a buzzword standing in for a conceptual state of "ancient enmity", as though civil strife in the

Middle East can be so easily dismissed as a symptomatic condition of antagonism borne out of the irreconcilable fanaticism of religious belief. But if irreconcilable conflict is a condition inherent to these communities on account of their respective theological differences (as some would have us believe), how would explain the longevity of these culturally diverse regions?

Orthodox, Maronite, Sunni, Shia, Alawite, Druze and Ismaili (to name a few) have coexisted, with some conflict but mostly in a state of relatively peaceful equilibrium for hundreds of years in the region. In light of this it could be persuasively argued that the horrors of civil war that have come to afflict these people who have coexisted and cooperated together for centuries is representative of base power dynamics related to resources, with theological or cultural 15 differences playing a subordinate role to conflicts that fundamentally have the material issues of land, water and political power at their root.

This being said however, the times when theological differences have had deadly consequence should definitely be acknowledged in the context of these communities. In regards to the communities of Lebanon and Syria the most stark examples of how accusations of heresy can come to define the lifestyles and identities of entire communities would probably be exemplified by the Alawite and Druze communities. Both of these closed communities were offshoots of Shiite Islam with complex, initiatory mystical customs who historically faced near- extinction under accusation of apostasy by the dominant Sunni 'ulema of the Middle Ages for this very reason. This heritage of persecution drove the early Druze and Alawites into the high ground, in a manner of speaking. The traditional home-regions of these people have been the isolated but very defendable natural fortresses of the Syrian highlands, examples being the semi- mountainous Golan region of Palestine (whose native Druze currently experience occupation by the Israeli military for similarly strategic reasons), and the coastal highlands of Latakia which continue to serve as a cultural stronghold for the Alawites of Syria. In the case of the Alawites, those living in mountainous regions were able to maintain a measure of autonomy despite living in one of the most destitute and least developed regions of the country. They were for the most part isolated, rural agrarian peasants who grew tobacco and other crops, and sometimes leased their youth to work as house servants in the estates of richer, mostly Sunni urban families.1

Prior even to the collapse of Ottoman rule in Syria, the European imperial powers were in the habit of styling themselves as protectors of minorities in Syria, with the French claiming protective rights over the Maronites of Lebanon, the Russians claiming the Orthodox Christians, and the British claiming to represent the Druze and Jewish communities. This relationship, 16 although in some ways improving the lives of these communities through the favoritism of a powerful external force, also had the effect of creating mistrust and hostility on the part of

Ottoman governates as well as contingents of the majority Sunni Arab population who interpreted these relationships as weakness to encroaching European cultural imperialism. In this way divisions were deepened between neighboring communities that also consequentially led to to some communities becoming increasingly tight-knit and cohesive as functional political entities with a deeply embedded ethno-religious background to cement this identity. In the post-

Colonial period of nascent nation-state building in the region, these formed the foundational conditions for a general transformation of these communities into political/social units that are mostly religious in title only -- a situation in which adaptive and reactionary nationalism has had the effect of de-sacralizing the spiritual identities of these communities, although religious ritual, liturgy and symbolism continues to play a strong symbolic role despite the common situation of individual identity being determined by what community one is born (or married) into, regardless of what one's personal beliefs may actually be.2

In the case of the Alawites, this transformation in social identity was particularly significant, so much so that by the 1980s during the peak of Hafez al-Assad's power, what it meant to be an Alawite in Syria was nearly unrecognizable in comparison to what it may have meant around the turn of the century. Alawites, as a community have historically taken on chameleon-like characteristics to protect themselves from persecution, whether it be the adoption of Sunni Hanafi formulas of prayer to evade the scrutiny of Ottoman authority, to the expressed imitation of aspects of Christianity to escape the threat of genocide at the hands of invading

Crusaders during the middle ages.3 During the period of colonial administration in which the

French and the British embarked upon their project of national partition, the Alawite 17 communities of Syria appealed to the colonial powers in hope of being granted a state of their own, a notable event in this process being when the Alawite Sheik Suleiman al-Assad (the father of Hafez al-Assad and grandfather of Bashar) participated as a signatory in a letter sent to the

Jewish Prime-Minister of France Leon Blume in 1936, comparing the plight of his people to that of the Jewish people, forcefully stating that

the Alawis refuse to be annexed to Muslim Syria because, in Syria, the official religion of the state is Islam, and according to Islam, the Alawis are considered infidels… Do the French leaders want the Muslims to have control over the Alawi people in order to throw them into misery? The spirit of hatred and fanaticism embedded in the hearts of the Arab Muslims against everything that is non-Muslim has been perpetually nurtured by the Islamic religion. There is no hope that the situation will ever change. Therefore, the abolition of the Mandate will expose the minorities in Syria to the dangers of death and annihilation, irrespective of the fact that such abolition will annihilate the freedom of thought and belief. We can sense today how the Muslim citizens of Damascus force the Jews who live among them to sign a document pledging that they will not send provisions to their ill--fated brethren in Palestine. The condition of the Jews in Palestine is the strongest and most explicit evidence of the militancy of the Islamic issue vis--a--vis those who do not belong to Islam. These good Jews contributed to the Arabs with civilization and peace, scattered gold, and established prosperity in Palestine without harming anyone or taking anything by force, yet the Muslims declare holy war against them and never hesitated in slaughtering their women and children, despite the presence of England in Palestine and France in Syria. Therefore, a dark fate awaits the Jews and other minorities in case the mandate is abolished and Muslim Syria is united with Muslim Palestine. The union of the two countries is the ultimate goal of the Muslim Arabs.

Within this letter the Alawite leadership of the time vehemently disengaged themselves from an Islamic identity and argued that the Muslims of Syria and Palestine were implacably bent on eradicating both the Jewish and Alawite communities, thereby necessitating the creation of respectively isolationist states formed on ethnoreligious lines that also required the acknowledgement, approval and support of the European powers.

Following the creation of the Syrian state in 1946, the Alawite community changed its approach considerably, with many Alawites (the younger generation of the time in particular) finding refuge within the pan-Arabist platform of Baathism, as many minority communities in 18

Greater Syria did at that time as well. People previously residents of marginalized communities such like Hafez al-Assad were able to find solidarity within the pan-Arabist movement, and found agency and status within the Syrian military in particular. The congregation of Alawites within the Syrian military is a crucial detail to keep in mind when considering how it was that

Hafez al-Assad was able to not only pull off a militarist coup in 1972, but maintain power afterwards through a system of familial patronage. Assad recognized the limitations and dangers of minority rule however and used his power and influence within the Alawite community to attempt to alienate them from their insular identity and secretive doctrine through an

"encouraged" process of assimilation with the majority Sunni communities of Syria, wherein

Alawite families intermarried with Sunni families, where ostensible recognition of Alawism as a branch of Shiism was achieved though the blessing and acknowledgement by the Lebanese Shia

Imam and activist Musa al-Sadr, and public observance of Alawite liturgy and ritual was essentially banned by Assad's Baathist regime. As "Khudr", an Alawite contributor to Dr. Joshua

Landis's blog Syria Comment stated in the 2012 post The Alawi Dilemma – Revisited:

Baathism amplified the prejudices of Arab nationalists against local, religious, and cultural peculiarities to an absurd degree. It would have been suicidal during the late president’s rule to establish any sort of gathering or group of Alawis under any cultural, social or religious banner. We couldn’t even mention the name of our communities openly. We lived in a stifling world of taboos and social conformism. The only meeting ground or assembly point for Alawis, where we didn’t have to pretend that we were something we weren’t, was deep in the inner sanctums of the security state. We found ourselves in the clubby security of the secret services, the Republican Guard, the army officer academies, and the worker and agricultural syndicates in the coastal area. These were all regime sanctioned and established institutions that linked our identity to the security state and Assad rule... The full ramifications of this fact were not visible or even felt among Alawis until the current crisis challenged us with the notion of radical change. Alawis are subconsciously realizing that being an Alawi means nothing outside of Asad family rule.6

Although this transformation in social identity has been very visible in the role of minority communities in the Syrian Arab Republic in the years leading up to the outbreak of war in 2011, it is in Lebanon where these dynamics are the starkest, as well as typically being the 19 most confusing to the outsider. Lebanon and Syria, both in the Ottoman period and in the eras preceding it, was not considered a nation distinct from Syria until the French colonial powers dug their fingers into the Cedar-crested heights of Mount Lebanon and secured themselves a stretch of Mediterranean beach-front administrated by their Maronite client-protectorates. The rigid "confessional" political structure engendered by this relationship in which specific ethno- religious communities were confined to specific political positions and representations within the

Lebanese parliament had the effect of "entrench(ing) the economic position and interests of the elite, enabling an economic system that -- unlike the rest of the twentieth-century Arab world -- could be described as neoliberal from the start."6 This heavily-weighted and arguably exploitative power structure is still, theoretically at least, in place in the present day. The effect of these confessional politics have been devastating to the oppressed and disenfranchised classes of Lebanon for decades, and can be clearly shown to have had crucial influence on the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon.

Burdens of Responsibility

In the years between 2000 and 2010, a drought swept across Syria, particularly affecting the northeast regions of the country containing the governates of Ar-, Aleppo, Deir ez-Zor, and Al-Hasakah, all of which are regions that have experienced sustained states of violent conflict since the outbreak of war as well as having experienced high-volumes of rural peoples displaced in the years preceding the war, an example of which being a reported exodus of approximately 200,000 rural residents of the Aleppo district alone into urban areas by 2010.1 20

Although occurrences of droughts are not unusual to Syria, this particular period of low- rainfall in the 2000s was the lowest recorded in the 20th Century.2 Coinciding with this period were estimated crop failures at 60% between the years of 2006-10 in addition to this particular period seeing the “the worst long-term drought and most severe set of crop failures since agricultural civilizations began in the Fertile Crescent many millennia ago”, as described in the opinion of seed-conservation activist Gary Nabhan in a 2010 article on the subject published on the environmental-justice website Grist.3 A May-2009 article in the English-language Syrian publication Syria Today reported that Syria's national wheat harvest average of 2007/08 came in at 2.1 million tonnes, in striking contrast with the nation's long-term average of 4.7 million tonnes. Since the nation's annual internal consumption of wheat was around 3.8 million tonnes, the Syrian state was forced to import wheat for the first time in 15 years.4 In addition to internal displacement of portions of the rural population, another humanitarian crisis that occurred during this time was widespread malnutrition among the populations affected by the drought, with a

2010 UN report estimating that 3.7 million people experienced food insecurity alongside of increasing nutrition-related diseases, one example being an estimated 42 percent of children aged six-to-twelve years old suffering from anaemia in the Raqqa governate.5

For the purpose of lucidity in engaging with relevant ecological factors possibly contributing to the Syrian conflict, we can identify the phenomenon of drought as being the crux of the subject, with drought being defined here as not merely the absence of water but rather "the consequence of a natural reduction in the amount of precipitation over extended period of time, usually a season or more in length, often associated with other climatic factors (such as high temperatures, high winds and low relative humidity) that can aggravate the severity of the event."6 Although the core issue of drought is commonly agreed upon as a factor, the causes of 21 the drought as well as the influences of this condition on the Syrian war itself is a matter of some contention among both researchers of the subject as well as those in media, academia and elsewhere who take divergent positions on this research for various reasons. Fundamental to the contention on this subject are the questions of what caused the drought in the first place -- was the regional drought the result of a fairly typical event heavily aggravated by global climate change? Was it the result of incidental extreme weather, rather than climate? Or perhaps, as some assert, the drought itself not the crucial influential factor but rather the agricultural mismanagement of the Syrian state that contributed to water shortages and subsequent massive crop failure in rural Syria, which consequentially led to the aforementioned displacement of hundreds of thousands of rural Syrians.

There a couple of oft-cited studies that have been brought up in the last couple of years that take some specific stances on this subject that we will examine within this paper, one being a collaborative study published in 2015 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

(PNAS) entitled Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought, the other of which is the Routledge-published 2014 study entitled The Role of Drought and Climate Change in the Syrian Uprising: Untangling the Triggers of the Revolution. Both of these studies are relatively short in length but draw on a weighty repertoire of sources, and take divergent stances on the severity of the role of climate change on the drought in question, but notably without disagreement that climate change played some kind of influential role, with the question being how much prominence that role had. But it is primarily the divergence in analysis between these two studies that will be brought into focus here.

Francesca De Chatel essentially argues the position that it is the Syrian Government that bears the brunt of the responsibility for the humanitarian crisis of the drought rather than climate 22 change or any other ecological factor. Chatel's study has significant relevance to the subject of this paper for the reason that her position is expressly not dismissive of the influence of climate change, as she acknowledges it as a potentially substantial influence that may have strongly contributed to the crisis. But Chatel argues that this factor functions as a kind of final coup de grace rather than a fundamental actor, with the drought having "exacerbated an already disastrous situation... it merely highlighted the rising poverty levels and accentuated a series of trends that had been taking shape for decades."7 In Chatel's opinion the ultimate responsibility for this disastrous "series of trends" rests firmly in the hands of the Syrian government, and contrary assertions risk the danger of deflecting the necessary accountability where it is due, thereby obstructing potential engagement and resolution of the crisis. She summarizes this position in her essay by stating:

While climate change may have contributed to worsening the effects of the drought, overstating its importance is an unhelpful distraction that diverts attention away from the core problem: the long-term mismanagement of natural resources. Furthermore, an exaggerated focus on climate change shifts the burden of responsibility for the devastation of Syria's natural resources away from the successive Syrian governments since the 1950s and allows the Assad regime to blame external factors for its own failures.8

A key position that Chatel couches her argument within is that the exceptionally brutal drought of 2007 through 2008 affected more than just Syria -- countries such as Iraq,

Israel/Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon were also stricken by this same meteorological event, but it is Syria that stands out for the ensuing humanitarian crisis that was characterized by mass- migrations of populations and widespread malnutrition, which Chatel explains as being symptomatic of a pre-existing humanitarian crisis that the Syrian government is ultimately responsible for due to their neglectful policies and state practices, becoming in effect "the 23 culmination of 50 years of sustained mismanagement of water and land resources, and the dead end of the Syrian government's water and agricultural policies."9 The indictment of the Syrian deep-state as the chief perpetrator of the humanitarian crisis associated with the drought is lent some added weight in Chatel's analysis through the inclusion of the research and positions of some other researchers and analysts who suggest that the drought, despite its severity is not at all a unique occurrence in Syria, and this angle is presented alongside quotations by researchers skeptical of the commonly-quoted hypothesis asserting that evidence of increasingly extreme weather trends in connection to climate change can be ascertained through modeling.10

Part of this inclusion of critical analysis is presented through references to the research of ecologist and conservationist Gianluca Serra (who interestingly also wrote a piece for The

Ecologist website debunking various media claims that the Islamic State's seizure of the city of

Palmyra in 2015 was responsible for pushing the critically-endangered Northern Bald Ibis into extinction).11 Serra, whose knowledge and expertise is apparently derived from a decade of experience working on various conservation projects in northern Syria, asserts that that experiments carried out within a ten-year period in the Al Talia Reserve (the first Syrian nature reserve, established in 1996 with Italian cooperation and positioned in the steppes surrounding

Palmyra), demonstrates that "vegetation in the desert naturally adapts to droughts and wet periods" and that "if the ecosystem is healthy, the vegetation can deal with prolonged droughts."12 Serra arrived at his conclusion through the study of the effect of un-regulated animal-agriculture on the Syrian steppes in contrast with the removal of animal grazing on these same steppes. Desertification, according to Serra's research, continued unabated where flocks of sheep were permitted to continue grazing, whereas the vegetation in areas where such grazing 24 was prohibited survived and retained its vitality in the midst of the great drought that was occurring during the same years this experiment was taking place.

The conclusions arrived at by Chatel's research, as well as that of Serra's, is oriented towards identifying the environmental degradation in Syria as predominantly the responsibility of the Syrian government (including the pre-Baathist apparatus) while simultaneously acknowledging the existence of the influence of climate change. Since taking this position considers the influence of climate and weather patterns to be subordinate to the consequences of agricultural mismanagement in this case, a critical analysis of this position is dependent on bringing the state-run and state-influenced business practices in Syria under a magnifying glass, which is something we will do later in this essay.

It worthy of note that Chatel's research and hypothesis is centrally-focused on direct and short-term effects of human activity on Syria's ecology, and that the human subjects in question are exclusively those operating within the national boundaries of the Syrian Arab

Republic. One possible critique of this approach could be that this position risks narrowing one's view and frame of reference through a measure of exclusivity. In other words, what relevantly direct and short-term human effects on the ecology of Syria might be coming from actors existing outside the national boundaries of Syria?

Climate, Weather and the Macro-view

The collaborative study presented in Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought agrees on some points with Chatel's work, particularly in the sense that it also indicts the policies and practices of the Syrian Government in contributing to a heightened vulnerability to drought within the predominantly-agricultural 25 regions of Syria. In the words of Kelley and his colleagues, the key agricultural vulnerability of water scarcity was exasperated by policies originally initiated by Hafez al-Assad that included

"land redistribution and projects, quota systems, and subsidies for diesel fuel to garner the support of rural constituents. These policies endangered Syria's water security by exploiting limited land and water resources without regard to sustainability."1 Following from this, it is the position of the authors of this study that these policies were enacted in an unsustainable way and therefore contributed heavily to the decline of groundwater. According to the study, "two-thirds of cultivated land is rain fed, but the remainder relies upon irrigation and groundwater." Farmers occupying the latter-third portion of the land mentioned in this quote rely on irrigation canals linked to tributaries feeding off from the Euphrates river. Others in this same region whose farms do not have direct access to these tributaries ended up relying heavily on pumped-groundwater, with approximately 60% of all water used in these regions having been drawn from groundwater reserves.2 In light of this, the authors argue that it was this reduction in available groundwater that made these regions in Syria particularly vulnerable, but it was the dramatic changes in rainfall that had the most significant effect, with consideration to the observed weather record in

Syria.

Syria's rain comes from the Medditeranean Sea, flowing in from west to east, arriving in the form of moist air that converges into sustained precipitation over the coastal regions and the agricultural breadbasket of the northeast regions we identified earlier in this paper. The authors draw their conclusions and analyses on rainfall and weather patterns in Syria primarily from data and statistics provided by University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (UAE CRU) as well as the two Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) stations in northeast Syria, which are positioned on the Euphrates in Deir ez-Zor as well as Qamishli by the Turkish border. The 26 authors of this study point out that the winter-to-winter variability of rainfall in nearby regions such as that in western Turkey are heavily influenced by a weather phenomenon called the North

Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), where a north-south shift of fluctuations in sea-level atmospheric pressure between the Icelandic low and the Azores high (the twin poles of atmospheric pressure zones that define this phenomenon) direct storm tracks and the westerly wind directions.

However in eastern Turkey, all of Syria and in other regions in the Fertile Crescent, the NAO influence is apparently weak to the point of being barely noticeable. The significance of this, in the words of the authors, is that the absence of this enormous climatological variable "[allows] observational analyses to identify an externally forced winter drying trend over the latter half of the 20th century that is distinguishable from natural variability."3 Implied within this sentence is the direct influence of those factors that stand outside of natural variability, or to name it in a more direct way, the consequence of anthropogenic climate change.

The assertion here is that climate models simulate long-term drying trends for the region, and that these trends are indicative of human-induced climate change. Drawing on a 100-year sample of data from the region occurring between the years of 1900 and 2000 provided by CRU, they state that "the century-long, statistically significant trends in both precipitation and temperature suggest anthropogenic influence and contributed to the severity of the recent drought."4 The evidence provided for this position is substantiated by interpretations of data gathered within the sample period provided by the GHCN and CRU, as well as the remotely- sensed data provided by the NASA Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Tellus project.

Since the hypothesis provided by the authors is contingent on modeling however, the interpretation of the data provided by the sources mentioned here may appear to be presented in 27 such a way as to fit into larger, more global models of climate trends. The authors appear to acknowledge this, stating their position in their abstract on the first page of the study that:

We show that the recent decrease in Syrian precipitation is a combination of natural variability and a long-term drying trend, and the unusual severity of the observed drought is here shown to be highly unlikely without this trend... No natural cause is apparent for these trends, whereas the observed drying and warming are consistent with model studies of the response to increases in greenhouse gases. Furthermore, model studies show an increasingly drier and hotter future mean climate for the Eastern Mediterranean.5

One of the problematic aspects of making this kind of argument is the timescale involved in the sample selection. In using a one hundred-year period of time for their data sample (a very short sample period by climatological standards), Kelley and his colleagues run the risk of describing trends in weather rather than the long-term trends of climate. Of course the tricky thing about doing this kind of research and making the argument that these researchers are making is that a one hundred-year data sample on rainfall in Syria may be the only information available within the constraints of the observable record. The authors attempt to insulate themselves from this pitfall somewhat by stating that the trends identified in the 100-year sample are consistent with longer-term drying trends in the global climatological model, but when it comes down to building a case out of the foundations of recorded data, there is debatably some ambiguity in anchoring one's argument in a measure of speculative comparison with other analytical models. Keeping this in mind, it is worthwhile to compare this study to other climatologically-oriented studies that examine increasing drying trends in other regions predisposed to periodic droughts. As an example, one contemporary study in this context is the

2015 paper entitled Unprecedented 21st century drought risk in the American Southwest and

Central Plains written by Toby Ault, Benjamin Cook and Jason Smerdon, published by the

American Association for the Advancement of Science. Taking its place alongside numerous 28 other studies addressing the pattern of increasingly severe dryness that has afflicted the state of

California and the Southwestern regions of the United States in the past decade,6 the study utilizes "empirical drought reconstruction and three soil moisture metrics from 17 state-of-the-art general circulation models" to make a case for anthropogenic influence on a long-term trend of increasing dryness in the deserts of the American southwest, and does so by using a timescale of modeled data spanning over a thousand years -- a temporal scale that is much more conducive to a climatological argument. The reason there is not a more substantial timescale present in

Climate Change in the Fertile Crescent may be that there is not enough reliable recorded data on soil moisture and rainfall statistics that exist outside of a contemporary one hundred-year sample, or maybe the global climate trends modeled in other studies are considered to be sufficient background evidence for the argument presented by the authors. Regardless of their reasons, there is arguably some weakness in presenting a case that hinges on climate change while providing such a relatively short sample as evidence for your claim.

In comparing the positions taken respectively by Chatel and by Kelley and his colleagues, it is interesting to note that they both acknowledge a kind of holistic origin to the crisis -- Chatel acknowledges the global phenomenon of climate change as a factor while insisting that climate change alone cannot account for the conditions that lit the fuse of the conflict (and must actually be considered to be subordinate to short-term human influences on local ecology), while Kelley,

Mohtadi, Cane, Seager and Kushnir devote ample space within their study to describing policy- related actions undertaken by the Syrian state that "heightened the vulnerability" of the region to drought, in addition to carefully acknowledging and supporting the critical reservation that "data- driven methods do not provide the causal narrative needed to anoint a "theory" of civil conflict, and the quantitative work on climate and conflict has thus far not adequately accounted for the 29 effects of poor governance, poverty, and other sociopolitical factors."6 It could arguably be said that the attitudes expressed in both of these studies are cautiously inclusive in recognizing influential factors that exist outside of the major focus of their studies, in spite of the assertiveness utilized by both of them when stating their cases. Both of these papers make space within their study to acknowledge that no single factor can satisfactorily used explain the crisis beyond agreeing that there is a massive ecological mover looming behind the origins of the

Syrian Civil War.

There is a particular area of convergence between these studies that remains largely unexplored within their research however, and this is the influence of the hydroelectric dams on the ecology, water level and flow of the Euphrates river. Kelley and company write that agriculture in northeastern Syria, in addition to being dependent on precipitation and groundwater reserves, is also heavily reliant on irrigation stemming from the Euphrates and

Tigris rivers and their tributaries. Francesca de Chatel likewise mentions conditions of "extreme poverty" existing among the rural populations regions of northeastern Syria alongside the impact of Turkey's large-scale construction on the Euphrates that began in the 1970s.

The headwaters of these rivers originate in the mountains of eastern Turkey and control over the water flows of these rivers is firmly in the hands of the Turkish state. The authors point out that the governments of Syria and Turkey had a period of relatively amicable relations during the 2000s and that Turkey increased the water flow to Syria during this period, but the shorthanded way this subject is addressed is problematic for a few reasons. First of all, acknowledging that Turkey "increased the flow" of the Euphrates downstream firmly places the leverage of a resource that is vital to Syrian agriculture and ecology in the hands of an actor that has a complicated (and storied) relationship with the Syrian state. They cite a 1999 study to 30 suggest that "overuse of groundwater has been blamed for the recent drying of the Khabur river in Syria's northeast,"7 without mentioning that the Khabur river is a tributary of the Euphrates whose water flow is inextricably tied to the flow of the Euphrates itself, which makes it wholly affected by the dams upstream and the energy needs of the urban and industrial infrastructure within the Turkish state that those dams support. Thirdly, the administration of Turkey's president Erdogan and the Assad regime have effectively been locked in a state of war with each other for several years, an ostensible proxy war exemplified by substantial material support of

Syrian rebel factions on the part of the Turkish state. Worthy also of mention here is the 1.5 million Syrian refugees of the conflict that Turkey has taken the responsibility of housing in massive tent-cities for the past several years.8

Shallow Wells in the Deep State

When possible root causes of the agricultural catastrophe in northern Syria that accompanied the drought are separated out and examined closely, the statistics and details surrounding the role that the Syrian state played in the economy and infrastructure of Syrian agriculture lend considerable weight to the accusation that the Syrian government bears tremendous responsibility for heightening the damaging effects of the drought on Syrian agriculture. Statistics alone do not tell this story however, in fact it could be safe to assume that absolutely no set of surface details that involves the Assad government can be expected to inform the reader in any kind of coherent way, considering the high level of secrecy and authoritarian control that has been historically exercised by the Baathist regime. Therefore, when parsing out the details of this story it becomes necessary to have to help of insight written by 31 insiders -- people within Syria who may have this kind of insight, and those who have friends in

Syria and direct experience in the Baathist state. For the purpose of trying to build a more comprehensive picture here we will return to the analysis of Francesca de Chatel for some of the surface information, and strengthen this information with the invaluable insight of researchers such as Bassam Haddad (director of the Middle East Studies Program at Mason University), as well as Syrian bloggers and activists.

Beginning with some historical context, Chatel informs us in her research that since the

1950s, water policy in Syria has been driven by a "supply-side approach with a specific focus on dam construction and irrigation projects in the north-east of the country."1 In the twenty-five years between 1985 and 2010, the irrigated areas of the country doubled from 651,000 to 1.35 million hectares in size. In the analysis of Chatel, the massive drive to develop Syria's agricultural sector outstretched the capacity of the land to support this kind of development, and since Syria's dam projects have never provided enough water to irrigate the entirety of this development, requiring an estimated 60% of the surface of this area to be irrigated with groundwater -- a resource that when used in this manner was severely depleted and has never been replenished in any way equitable to its extraction, creating a situation in which the rising demand accompanying these ambitious development projects and the continued drive to expand these irrigated area have consequentially created the groundwater deficit mentioned earlier in this paper.

Population growth is something that also deserves serious attention here. The "youth bulge" of the Middle East and North Africa is occasionally given center stage by analysts and media attempting to expound upon the origination of the Arab Spring. It doesn't take all that much probing into local history, politics, economic and so forth to come to the conclusion that 32 making an underemployed youth-boom empowered by social media the central cause of the Arab

Spring is kind of reductive. But population has increased enormously in this region, and has coincided with both massive development and the steadily-dwindling groundwater reserves in the same land repeatedly parched by successive droughts. Beginning in the 1950s, the Syrian government embarked on a strongly pro-natalist policy, encouraging a population boom as part of the nationalist project, one that actually went so far as the official ban on the use and trade of contraceptives during the 1970s.

In this case we can see government-obstruction of reproductive rights in order to intentionally stimulate population growth is one of many hallmarks of the intense social control exerted by the Assad government over the people of Syria. Hafez al-Assad and his network of close associates, placed in the inevitably and naturally precarious position of being a minority cabal of political and military leaders exercising autocratic authority over a greatly diverse mass of people, practiced numerous ways of ensuring that the Syrian population was ultimately dependent on the Syrian state for survival, in a way that could be described as a kind of sectarian minority power-base enforcing broader policies that formented national and non-sectarian cohesion within the Syrian nation. Keeping in mind the transition of the Syrian Alawites from a poor, rural community with a history of having a kind of cultural "otherness," into a consolidated close-knit power group entrenched within the Syrian military institutions that we examined in the section about Alawites earlier in this paper, we can see some of the broader ways that Hafez al-

Assad sought to redefine Syrian society in such a way that blurred and sublimated the cultural individuality of Syria's sects and communities by forcing them into an interdependent relationship with the state. Bassam Haddad observes in his deeply informative 2012 book

Business Networks in Syria: the Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience that 33

Sectarian identity was used to mobilize support for political goals -- that is, as a means, not and end -- although the coincidence of class, regional, and sectarian divisions made it difficult to isolate the causes... [Assad] knew that he could not both 'Alawize the elite and maintain the exclusion of the urban middle classes, which were predominantly Sunni. His regime had to accommodate parts of the urban-Sunni establishment politically and socially, and harness their economic and well as their disruptive potential in order to step up the capital accumulation needed to build a stronger, more stable state. By reaching out to segments of urban society through policies of economic rapprochement and controlled liberalization, Assad was at once able partly to legitimize a moderate nationalist-socialist regime, secure capital accumulation, and appease powerful segments of the business community that remained in Syria.2

One strategy accompanying Assad's state-building project was the managing the economies of particular governates in such way to ensure that self-sufficiency was never achieved in any part of the nation. Agricultural areas were forced to monocrop, singularly growing crops such as wheat or cotton, thereby forcing them to import necessary goods from other areas within the country. Any place within Syria that provided a vital resource was treated in this way -- the northeastern oil-rich portions of Syria for example were permitted to construct wells, but no refineries to commodify the resource, once again ensuring that should a secessionist revolt occur in this part of the country, the people living there would be bereft of a way to achieve economic independence from the Syrian state.

Assad's strategy of denying potential economic independence to the constituent governates of Syria was instated as part of the overall strategy of ensuring national independence from foreign imports and the Western economic network in a way that bears some resemblance to North Korea's Juche (self-reliance) policy, albeit in a much milder and less isolationist form, and carried out with a political philosophy that could be said to bear some resemblance to

National Socialism, as noted by Haddad in the excerpt above. As part of the twinned process of securing national dependence on the state/making the state self-reliant to eschew dependence on foreign imports, the Syrian state made heavy use of subsidies in the business sector. During the 34 era of Bashar al-Assad and the critical period during the 2000s that is the primary focus of this paper, these critical subsidies that the agricultural infrastructure of Syria had come to rely upon for so many years were slashed, as a move deemed necessary due to the growing budget deficit, but also as part of a neoliberal economic reform scheme on the part of Bashar's government called the "10 Five-Year Plan (2006-2010)" intended to introduce wide-sweeping deregulation measures "in a bid to integrate the Syrian economy into the global system and prepare the country for accession to the World Trade Organization."3

The resources vital to Syrian farmers hit hardest by the liberalization of the agricultural sector were diesel fuel and chemical fertilizer. In May of 2008, the cancellation of the subsidy on diesel fuel boosted prices overnight from seven Syrian Pounds ($0.14) to SYP25 ($0.53). Diesel fuel is critical for farmers in this region because they rely upon the fuel both to pump groundwater for irrigation and to transport their crop to the markets following harvest. Prices for chemical fertilizer were also hiked in a similar way, with the price per 50-kilo volume doubling in May of 2009 from SYP450 ($9.60) to SYP900 ($19.15). To put some of the cost in context,

Chatel points out in her research into the effects of Syria's liberalization on rural farmers "the average monthly salary in Syria in 2009 was $242, but most farmers earned significantly less than this, with 30 percent of workers in the agricultural sector earning $109 or less."4

The phasing out of these subsidies were also devastating to Syrian farmers because there was no social safety net to soften the blow of the removal of a resource that so many had come to depend on, and indeed had been forced to depend on by the regime itself. In fact it could be said that the subsidies were actually a vital part of what safety net actually existed in Syria's national socialist economic arrangement. Bashar's authoritarian neoliberal escapade had dire consequences. In the words of one Syrian opposition blogger, "while the Syrian economy rapidly 35 produced wealth during the first decade of Bashar, it did not produce jobs – 40,000 jobs a year were created for a workforce that expanded annually by 100,000–300,000."5 The regime insiders basically enriched themselves while a drought ravaged the breadbasket of the nation and expelled thousands of working-class Syrians from their livelihoods. Accompanying this condition is the apparent neglect of critical agricultural infrastructure. According to a 2012 article featured on the website Jadaliyya, 47% of the groundwater wells in Syria were not in good working order despite the overwhelming dependency on them for irrigation. Further lack of proper oversight and regulation (which can only be summarized as corruption due to the deep- state nature of Syria's government) consequentially caused much of the groundwater pumped to be not fit for human consumption due to high levels of salinity and pollution, forcing many

Syrian citizens to rely on private contractors for access to drinking water -- which even then was often contaminated.6 The overall situation is scathingly summed up in the notgeorgesabra post referenced earlier, where the anonymous author lays out how

The decade prior to the revolution was an unhappy one for Syria’s 99%. Bashar al-Assad ‘reformed’ the national socialist regime he inherited from his father until it became a fascist kleptocracy. Subsidies for fuel, food, fertilizer, and pesticides were slashed even as their prices on the world market skyrocketed. These cuts tripled diesel prices overnight in May 2008 and doubled chemical fertilizer prices a year later. A private banking system was created. Protectionist monopolies awarded to (inferior) Syrian manufacturers began to end. Restrictions on foreign investment were relaxed and capital from the Gulf states poured in, creating a boom in urban real estate. As GDP tripled from $21 billion to $59 billion during Bashar’s early reign, the Assad family used its monopoly over the state machine to become fabulously rich. Bashar’s cousin Rami Makhlouf physically muscled his way to the top of the business elite, becoming a telecom billionaire and owning a whopping 60% of the economy by the time the uprising broke out.7

In Bassam Haddad's analysis, the deeply-entwined rapprochement and synthesis of business and state power that occurred in Egypt has not occurred in Syria due to long-standing animosity and mistrust between those in Syrian society who held capital and financial power (in 36 this case the families of the Sunni business elite), and those who held political and military power (the Assad family and the Alawites entrenched within the Baath party and military).

Haddad argues that creating networks of patronage and low-to-high trust relationships between the state and the business apparatuses as a way to maintain security in the state. The primacy of maintaining this security can be seen in Hafez al-Assad's willingness to completely overturn the secrecy and isolationism that traditionally characterized Alawite identity, and "Sunnify" the

Alawites to blend them into a greater Pan-Arabist identity.8 Bashar al-Assad can be seen to continue and solidify this trend through his marriage to Asma al-Assad, who hails from a prominent and wealthy Syrian Sunni family. But this merging of identities is fundamentally to the advantage of the Syrian financial elite, and it is apparent when reflecting on what has transpired from 2011-onward in Syria that Hafez's experiment in social engineering has deepened divisions between Alawites and Sunnis to an even greater extent. The author of the notgeorgesabra post characterizes this situation as

...a class war but not a war of class against class that unites landless against landlord, labor against capital, poor against rich. Rather, because of the configuration of the sect-class system overseen by the Assads, the revolution unites many classes against the regime even as it divides these classes against themselves. The pervasive poverty that compelled Sunnis with nothing to lose to take up arms against the regime compelled their impoverished Alawite counterparts to do the opposite, to take up arms in the regime’s defense since they have a material and social stake in it.

When you take a closer look at who it is at the helm of various factions in the war, class and economic characteristics become even more stark, with examples like Abdel Qader al-Saleh, the seed trader who sold his assets to finance his Liwa al-Tawhid brigade, formerly wealthy tourism entrepreneur Bashar al-Zoubi who became head of the Free Syrian Army's Southern

Front alliance, and perhaps the highest-profile and best-known Syrian rebel leader of all, Zahran 37

Alloush of the Islamist faction Jaysh al-Islam. Alloush was a contractor and the founder of a construction company who was also an Islamist activist jailed in the Sedenya prison and released by the regime in the early days of the revolution. Running one of the most powerful and dangerous rebel groups in Syria, Alloush was sometimes characterized before his death in 2015 as a "warlord" by the foreign press, as the Army of Islam not only fights the Syrian government and other belligerents such as the Islamic State, but also effectively runs the local economy of

East Ghouta where they are based.9, 10

In light of the copious research and observation that has been undertaken in this subject, it seems undeniable that corruption, greed and oppression indict the Syrian government not only in the humanitarian atrocity that sparked the outbreak of war, but also in the conditions that made living during the drought of 2000 - 2010 untenable for northeastern Syrians. However, that the intensity of the drought can be seen to be part of an ascendant climate trend and that there are so many other elements factoring into water shortages in Syria, it does an understanding of the greater picture a disservice to reduce it as something purely the responsibility of the Syrian government, as much as this responsibility does in fact exist and is crucial to understanding of the calamity.

The damming of the Euphrates and the “Kurdish Question”

The tradition and history of irrigated agriculture in the fertile crescent owes its existence to the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the many kingdoms and empires that have periodically risen, fallen, and held dominion over this part of the world throughout history have ultimately established their power base on the wealth and prosperity generated by this irrigated agriculture. Historically, the center of this practice and of this power base has been in the lower 38 part of the Tigris-Euphrates basin located in Mesopotamia (and modern day Iraq), where ancient precedents for this civilizational foundation can be found in examples like the Nahrawan canal of the 6th Century, and in the water-resource wars of the kingdoms of Umma and Lagash mentioned at the beginning of the paper. In Mesopotamian agriculture of antiquity, water- management was dependent on the manipulation of snow-melt flood waves originating from mountainous headwaters of the two rivers in Anatolia. Farmers during this period were forced to gamble with the effect of the flood waters of the rivers -- both low and high-flooding conditions could potentially lead to crop failure. In spite of these risks agriculture was enabled to flourish thanks to the aqueous bounty of these floods, but also partly due to the persistence of the functional and centralized governing essential to maintaining sustained widespread irrigation.1

The integration of modern industrial technology into contemporary farming techniques has had the effect of lessening dependence on these annual flows and floods, by means of mechanized irrigation and groundwater wells that can draw water from further sources with increased dependability. But as mentioned earlier in this paper, irrigation derived from these great rivers and their tributaries still account for a significant portion of the water utilized in

Syrian agriculture. In addition to this, it could be argued that the flow of these rivers still place a central role in the civilizational infrastructure of the region, but one that been transformed beyond only providing water as a direct agricultural resource. The most significant element of this transformation would be the arrival of the hydroelectric dam, which in the context of this study finds its most potent expression in Turkey's massive Southeastern Anatolia Project

(abbreviated in Turkish as GAP), an endeavor planned by the Turkish State Hydraulic Works agency that will, upon completion include 22 dams and 19 hydroelectric stations positioned on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that will also allow for and help facilitate irrigation in an area of 39

1.7 million hectares, a space roughly the size of Belgium.2 This project has a relatively long history, having had its conceptual origins in the 1930s, with dams and other infrastructure steadily being constructed as part of the greater scheme since the 1970s.

The centerpiece of this project is the Ataturk dam on the Euphrates -- an eight-turbined behemoth that is the largest dam in the GAP project. Located approximately 80 kilometers upstream from the Syrian border, one of the consequences created by the construction this dam has been a situation where the Turkish state has since 1990 refused to guarantee more than 50%

(500 m3 per second) of the natural flow of the Euphrates river downstream from the Turkish border, a policy that has been met with opposition and disagreement by the Syrian and Iraqi states, who have insisted that nothing less than a flow of 700 m3 is acceptable for their domestic needs. In considering that 88% of the flow of the Euphrates has its origin within central Anatolia and that the Ataturk dam itself has the power to raise or lower the water level of the entire river downstream of the reservoir, it seems pretty clear that the Turkish state maintains a stranglehold on the water flow of the Euphrates river and therefore occupies an advantageous position of inequitable strength when negotiating the distribution of this water with its neighbors downstream.3

The value of the GAP project to the present agricultural and economic infrastructure of

Turkey appears to be indispensable. Year-round production and irrigation has been enabled in some areas as a result, and all crops grown in the regions of southern Turkey affected by the

GAP project have seen massive increases in productivity ranging from estimates of a 90% increase in wheat production to a 250% increase in that of lentils, but a particularly notable increase is that of Turkey's domestic cotton crop. A third of Turkey's national cotton production is located within the GAP-affected region, and cotton farms within this region have seen an 40 estimated 600% increase in production thanks to the benefits of this project. The hydraulic infrastructure of the project also contributes to providing running water and electricity for the villages and cities in the region.

Hydroelectricity is not the dominant source of energy in domestic use within the Turkish republic -- the electricity generated by dams in 2010 for example accounted for 3,354 kteo (kilo tons of oil equivalent) of energy produced in the nation in contrast to the five-digit figures produced by natural gas, coal, lignite, petroleum and even wood, according to figures released by

Turkey's State Planning Organization.4 The government claims that upon completion the GAP project will generate over 27 billion kilowatt-hours, which will apparently be the manifested utilization of somewhere around 45% of Turkey's economically exploitable hydroelectric potential.5 Although this will be a significant increase of electrical power for the region it still will not outpace the domestic energy consumption of fossil fuels in Turkey, making agricultural irrigation the predominant contribution of the GAP project.

Although the Turkish state touts the GAP project as being something that will bring development to southeastern Turkey and help increase the prosperity of the nation as a whole, the undertaking of this project has not come without a significant amount of strife and dissent among the people who have found themselves to be the direct recipients of the effects of this project. The southwestern regions of Turkey that constitute the GAP-affected areas have a majority Kurdish population making up roughly 90% of the regional demographic living alongside the other ethnic minorities of Arabs, Turkmen and Armenians. The Kurdish people have had a long history of struggle with a Turkish state that maintained violently oppressive and racist policies with regards to their Kurdish and Armenian populations. At the hands of the

Turkish state, Kurdish people living in Turkey have historically experienced forced 41 displacements, massacres, food embargos, suppression of the press, arbitrary arrests, torture and executions, and have struggled under laws specifically designed to eradicate their ethnic and cultural identity, such as the criminalization of the Kurdish language itself and the banning of the word "Kurd" or "Kurdish", which was Turkish state-policy from 1980 up until 1991.6 These

Kurdish-majority regions are also the least-developed and most economically-depressed demographic regions in Turkey.

Alongside these numerous sustained injustices and atrocities, the GAP project itself has contributed to mass displacement of Kurdish people living in the region, as the damming of the

Euphrates, Tigris and their tributaries has flooded land that was previously home to Kurdish villages and farms. According to figures released in 2001, 200,000 people from 382 villages in the GAP-affected area have been displaced as a result of this project, with the Ataturk dam alone affecting 55,300 people in this manner.7 It is within the GAP project period of time and within the context of the Kurdish-Turkish relationship described here that the Kurdistan Workers Party

(abbreviated in Kurdish as the PKK) emerged, established by the Kurdish revolutionary and political theorist Abdullah Ocalan in 1975. Ocalan was the leader of a Marxist-influenced

Kurdish separatist revolutionary movement that fought a war with the Turkish state throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s that lead to the deaths of somewhere between 40,000 - 45,000 people, nearly half of which are estimated by international human-rights organizations to have been Kurdish civilian noncombatants who perished at the hands of the Turkish military. During this time Hafez al-Assad and the Syrian government supported the PKK in their war against the

Turkish state, permitting Ocalan and the men and women of the PKK to train, arm themselves, and direct their military operations from camps and bases within Syria and Lebanon.8 Although there has been periodic historical contention between Syria and Turkey regarding the province of 42

Hatay (which has been part of the national boundaries of Turkey since 1938), the water politics of the Euphrates river and the GAP project have been the primary locus of diplomatic conflict between these two states since the project was founded -- at least up until the outbreak of the

Syrian war in 2011. In this light it seems very likely that Assad's facilitation of the PKK insurgency was undertaken as a way to obtain political leverage with Turkey regarding these very water politics, especially considering that the Syrian government had no problem tossing aside their relationship with the PKK when it was no longer strategically advantageous for them to maintain this relationship, as demonstrated by their expulsion of Ocalan and the PKK from

Syria in 1998 upon Turkish threats of full-scale military intervention if Syria continued to harbor them, an act that initiated a significant thaw in the Turkish-Syrian political relationship that persisted until the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War.

When examining how the GAP project, Turkey's thorny "Kurdish Question", and

Turkish-Syrian political conflict over the Euphrates all intersect, certain aspects of the current war in Syria begin to appear significantly less isolated, both geographically and temporally. The autonomous regions of Rojava in northern and northeastern Syria bears a direct lineage to the

Kurdish-Turkish struggles of the 1970s and '90s and has established itself on the political theories and philosophies of Abdullah Ocalan. Rojava also happens to exist in some of the same northeastern agricultural regions of Syria that were struck by the drought of the 2000s described earlier in this paper, as well as being right on the border of Turkey's GAP project.

The importance of the GAP project to the Turkish state, and to Turkish aspirations for industrialized development cannot be understated. That the Ataturk dam bears the name of

Mustafa Ataturk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey and the veritable icon of Turkish nationalism, seems to possess tremendous symbolism in itself, with the dam even being depicted 43 on the reverse-side of the Turkish 1-Lira note, with Ataturk's likeness displayed on the front side of the bill. Most significant however would probably be the titanic effort pulled together by the

Turkish state to pull the project together in the first place. The GAP project was entirely funded by the economy of Turkey itself, a situation that was necessitated by the internationally contentious nature of the project due to the projects necessary seizure of an enormous portion of vital water resources both utilized and relied upon by the sovereign states of Syria and Iraq. As the University of Wales faculty Peter Beaumont described in his informative 1998 study

Restructuring of Water Usage in the Tigris-Euphrates Basin:

Of particular interest with the South-eastern Anatolia Project is the high level of commitment the government of Turkey has shown toward it. The financial provision for such projects from international organizations such as the World Bank is always dependent upon an agreement as to water use by all the states within the river basin. From an early stage in the planning process, Turkey realized that it would not be able to gain the agreement of Syria and Iraq for the use of the water volumes it proposed. Consequently, it was forced to finance the project entirely from funds generated within Turkey. This was a substantial drain on the finances of the nation, but indicates just how important the project was to the economic development of the nation.9

It can be inferred that the Turkish state's willingness to forego foreign aid and bear the enormous cost of this project under the stipulations of international financial constraints is demonstrable of the project's value to Turkey at seemingly any cost, as well as being a testament to the highly contentious nature of constricting the flow of the Euphrates with regards to the needs and perspectives of those nations downstream of Turkey. However in consideration of the motivations of entities such as the World Bank for not providing aid for the project, it seems likely that their concern for the project was not likely driven by the prospect of particular regions and peoples experiencing water shortages or displacement as a result, keeping in mind some of the exploitative "development" projects in various places around the world that these financial 44 institutions are prone to support. Rather it would seem that it is an issue of international diplomacy and the issue of the sovereignty of states, with the World Bank being reluctant to fully throw its financial weight behind a project so disputed in the international relations of local countries.

The Turkish Position

Beyond the obvious boon of economic and agricultural development that the GAP project brings, the Turkish state and those sympathetic to the project have their own counter-arguments to direct at critics of the project, and to their enemies in the Kurdish revolutionary movements in the south who oppose the project alongside opposing the sovereignty of the Turkish government in Kurdish lands in general. Supporters of the GAP project in Turkey argue that the infrastructure and development brought by the GAP project is ultimately beneficial to the Kurdish populations residing in the project's area of impact, in a big part due to increased services and employment opportunities but also thanks to programs funded by the project intended to elevate education in the rural populations of southeast Turkey, a majority (somewhere around 65%) of which are

Kurdish. Among the social development programs established by the GAP administration are a network of "Multipurpose Community Centers" (abbreviated as ÇATOM in Turkish).

Established with the collaboration of UNICEF in 1995, the ÇATOM centers provide education and health services with a particular focus on the education and employment of women in impoverished areas. According to a 2014 article published by the English-language Turkish publication the Daily Sabah,

In these centers particularly catering to women, lifelong learning courses, panels and conferences are held. Women are informed about their rights, laws, health issues, childcare et cetera. Literacy classes are also offered at ÇATOM as well as classes on sewing, handcraft, hairdressing and 45

similar subjects to help women to make a living on their own. They also serve as an intermediary for women entrepreneurs seeking microloans. Every year, about 200 women find employment after completing the courses offered by ÇATOM and at least 10 women start out their own businesses. More than 15,000 people attend ÇATOM programs every year.1

This same promotional article crafted by the Daily Sabah also asserts that the GAP project has provided 1.2 billion Turkish Lira into funding six new universities in the region, alongside providing 12 million Lira in scholarships for 1500 "impoverished female students." In addition to this the benefits incurred by the development accompanying the GAP program includes 24 new hospitals built between 2007 and 2012, thousands of work-education courses launched by the Turkish Public Employment Agency, and an earmarking of funds numbering around 420 million for Turkey's "Social Support Programs" between 2008 and 2013. Implicit within these figures that the Daily Sabah shares is the suggestion that this large-scale development will elevate the living standards of Turkish citizens in the region in the long-term, be they Kurdish or otherwise, in spite of the massive changes or displacement incurred by the implementation of this project.

Sources emanating from the Turkish State apparatus have a number of objections to outside criticism of the project. A central one is that it is a misrepresentation of reality to suggest that Turkey is actually water-rich in comparison to its neighbors. Turkey is possessed of one- fifth the quantity of water per capita as the water-richest countries in the world, and is one-sixth the average enjoyed by the European Union. In a statistical model cited by a study released by the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs entitled Water issues between Turkey, Syria and Iraq,

Turkey also supposedly ranks behind Iraq in cubic meters of water per capita, although they are

(according to this study) expected to overtake Iraq in the year 2020 with a lead of 980 cm to

Iraq's projected 950 cm.2 In table 1 featured in this study, Turkey is depicted as occupying a place in between Syria and Iraq when it comes to per-capita water consumption. Taking this 46 information and line of argument into consideration, the Turkish state insists that Syrian and

Iraqi objections to water usage by the GAP project hinge themselves on a position that is contradictory in comparison to what "international water experts" have to say about the matter, and that the water that Iraq and Syria insist on being granted for their own agricultural uses is unreasonable, suggesting that only half of the irrigable land in Iraq and Syria is actually efficient for "maximum production with irrigation," with one-sixth of the land being of marginal agricultural value and the remainder only possessing agricultural value with considerable investment. Using these figures as justification, Turkey insists that due to the disparity in land value between Turkey and Iraq and Syria, equal distribution of water from the Euphrates is an absurd idea, and that "it will not only be uneconomical but inequitable to utilize scarce water resources to irrigate infertile lands at the expense of fertile lands."2

Put simply, when it comes to any dispute about the water flow of the Euphrates, the

Turkish state An interesting and bluntly-written breakdown of Turkish policy towards water politics in general can be found on the website of the Republic of Turkey's Ministry of Foreign

Affairs. In their online statement Turkey's Policy on Water Issues they preface their position with a section entitled "Water Shortage on a Global Level", where they remind the reader that worldwide water shortages are projected to be a major issue in the future (a subject we'll talk about a bit in the conclusion of this paper), and that only mindful sustainable development that makes efficiency and distribution its priority will help remedy a looming global water crisis.

Following this rather sobering reminder of the bigger picture, Turkey lay out in brief summary their national water potential, their growing dependency on water both for energy and for food, and introduce the GAP project as a necessary component of both meeting these national needs as well as providing a model for the stewardship of water that will be increasingly necessary to 47 maintain global security as the world's population continues to grow and freshwater increases in demand. Included here also is Turkey's Transboundry Water Policy, wherein they establish their position that "each riparian state of a transboundary river system has the sovereign right to make use of the water in its territory without giving 'significant harm' to other riparians", that

"equitable use does not mean the equal distribution of waters of a transboundary river among riparian states", that the Turkish state has continually released the largest amount of water possible for them downstream from the GAP project (even in the driest of Summers), and that these very water politics should ultimately, in their opinion, be a "catalyst for cooperation" rather than a point of conflict between them and their neighbors.4

Justifications for the use of water made by the Turkish state aside, when it comes to

Syrian state objections to Turkish development on the Euphrates, there is a veneer of hypocricy that becomes apparent when one considers that Syria has its own hydroelectric project on the

Euphrates that has surfaced as an object of conflict between Syria and Iraq. Syria's Taqba dam on the Euphrates (whose reservoir has somewhat unsurprisingly been named by the

Syrian government) very nearly sparked off a war between Syria and Iraq in 1975, two years after the construction of the dam began. It was serious enough that the Iraqi state threatened to bomb the Taqba dam if construction continued, and the escalation of threatening rhetoric between the two states continued until they were mutually amassing their military forces on their borders and the Kingdom of and the Soviet Union stepped in to mediate the conflict, resulting in Syria guaranteeing a privately-disclosed volume of river-flow to Iraq.5 argues that it deserves more of the water flow because it has more irrigable land. Implied within

Turkey position also is that any water struggles that Iraq and Syria may be having may also 48 implicate political failure within those nations. An example of this is in the study mentioned above, where a subtle jab is taken at these governments:

Syria and Iraq state that each country must be free to choose the criteria it will use to determine its own water needs and that these should not be questioned by the other riparian states. In a democratic country like Turkey, it would be very difficult for a government to explain to the public such an arbitary way of determining water needs.5

Furthermore, the effect the on the social conditions preceding the outbreak of war in Syria may be even more relevant than that of the Taqba dam. The Tishrin dam is also located on the Euphrates within Syrian territory, placed 90 kilometers east of the city of Aleppo.

The construction of the dam and subsequent flooding the lands behind it led to the destruction of numerous ancient archeological sites, prompting "emergency evacuations" of ancient Upper-

Mesopotamian relics that were in the process of being unearthed when the construction of the dam began. In her study described in detail earlier in this paper, Francesca de Chatel lists the construction of the Tishrin dam as being one of the social upheavals (for which the Syrian regime bears responsibility) that helped lay the foundations for the bloody chaos that was to ensue later. As Chatel describes,

[the] families who lost their lands after the construction of the Tishrin Dam on the Euphrates in 1999 migrated to the Damascus suburb of Al-Hammouriyeh and were still living there in tents in 2009. Dozens of drought victims settled in a tent camp in Mzeireb near Dara'a from 2008 onwards, but inhabitants of the camp and their relatives in the north-east said the camp had existed for more than ten years. The drought just meant it had expanded.6

This is an instance where mass-displacement of people living in the northeast of Syria is directly described as being a consequence of the alteration of land created by the construction of a hydroelectric dam. For whatever animus the Syrian state may hold, or have held against Turkey for the creation of the GAP project, their own hydroelectric projects have, according to the 49 sources referenced here, wreaked their own devastation on the land and the people of the region unfortunate enough to find themselves in the path of industrialized progress. People lost their homes and their livelihoods to the march of progress embodied by the Tishrin dam, and one can only wonder what became of their lives once war broke out in 2011 and Aleppo was steadily shelled transformed in to a hellish prison. It is worth noting as well that this same dam has been a major focus of conflict in the war to date. Wrested from the hands of the Syrian government in

2012 by Syrian rebels, the taking of the dam marked a strategic victory that cut Syrian government forces off from a vital supply line as well as unifying previously separated rebel- held territories. Daesh later seized this same dam from rebel forces, only to be later expelled by the Kurdish and Syrian-rebel coalition called the in December of

2015.

With some of the perspectives of the Turkish position noted, and with it being it essential in exploring this kind of subject to try and acknowledge, note and incorporate all the points of view of a dispute to ascertain the truth of the matter as much as one can, the critical lens must also be directed at each of the contingent facets of the subject. In the case of the Turkish lines of argument listed above, there are some elements that are worth scrutinizing. Firstly, there are some major objections on the part of the Kurdish population of southeastern Turkey as to the actual economic benefits granted by the project to the Kurds. Feudalistic land-ownership structures abide in the southeast, with impoverished Kurdish farmers with little access to credit to buy their own land continue to work for landowners who represent the interests of the central government in Ankara. The educational boons touted by the Turkish state are also critisized for its standard of educating and teaching in the Turkish language alone -- a particularly sore subject for Kurds, considering that education in the native Kurdish language was illegal in Turkey until 50

2001. This, along with the flooding of Kurdish historical archeological sites such as the ancient fortress of Hasankeyf and the Roman-era ruins of Zeugma by the GAP project are experienced by the Kurdish people as something contiguous with Turkey's history of systemic policies intended to subsume and ultimately eradicate Kurdish identity.

When examined in isolation, the stories of the GAP project, the Tishrin dam and the

Taqba dam could appear to have significance independent of the origins of the Syrian Civil War.

However this conflict and the multiple ways it has played out demonstrate that there is no simple way to explain the conflict in terms of one particular demographic being entangled in the violent manifestations of old grievances with one particular other group of people. A common condition can be shown in comparing the conditions incurred by the Tishrin dam and the GAP project, albeit in a significantly different scale between them.

Conclusion

Acknowledging that the ecological conditions factoring into the Syrian Civil war cannot be reduced to one specific primary influence, in light of the research conducted on these influences, it is the position of this paper that the contribution that hydroelectric projects on the

Euphrates and Tigris rivers is an underrepresented factor.

The most important laws and regulations relating to the construction of dams, as well as those governing every kind of industrial or ecological project, are always national laws and policies, and almost never set as international standards. These laws vary from nation-state to principality, and are therefore subject to the arbitrary nature and potential rapaciousness of their native political and legal environment. Therefore, it becomes inevitable that adherence to those

"international standards" that are set by the United Nations or other clusters of political affiliates 51 are prone to take a backseat to those established within national boundaries. The inevitability of this is cemented by the primacy of national sovereignty within the schema and practice of

International Law -- a standard created out of the post-WWII era where a kind of schematic for accountability was necessary to create to help stave off predatory military incursions by larger, wealthier states into the sovereignty of smaller, or possibly compromised states. The devastation and horrific carnage incurred by the First World War was not enough to propel those clinging to a monopoly of force to seriously consider participation in the international collective bargaining table of the League of Nations. Thereby any international standard of legal and ethical accountability is in a sense only enforced by the coercive influence of a stronger-state or alliance of states in contrast to those who possess less bargaining power. Examples of this can be shown in the typified geopolitics of the Soviet Union and the United States during the cold-war period, or within the context of the Syrian conflict the NATO-GCC clusters of political allegiance in contrast with the political partnership shared by Russia, Syria, Iran and their respective non-state actor allies and proxies in Iraq and Lebanon.

Dams, as physical objects, are immovable occupiers of territory falling within the particular political sovereignty of nation-states. Whatever utility is derived from dams, be it hydroelectric power or irrigation, owes its existence to rivers. These rivers, as a resource commonly shared by humans and as habitats shared by bioregions, are not the subject of any significant international treaties or enforceable laws. Although there is a multitude of such international treaties and regulations relating to oceans and maritime law, rivers are not recognized in any similar way as common wealth between peoples and nations -- and a comparison between the law of the sea and the rights of riparian nations could be worth 52 comparing, considering that the oceans and some significant rivers both exist as common waters between nations.

Maritime law is vast in its variance and attention to detail, with categories, provisions and treaties ranging the spectrum of territorial seas, internal waters, bays, islands and archipelagoes, high seas and seabeds, even the continental shelves and the specific rights of coastal states.

International maritime law also has a doctrine called "the right of innocent passage" that in principle is supposed to permit merchant ships, regardless of nationality to pass through international waters without obstruction (although the interpretation of this doctrine is unsurprisingly interpreted with some elasticity by various states). Landlocked states are also supposed to enjoy de facto privilege to shipping on the open ocean due to their naturally under- privileged maritime status, and all disputes regarding international maritime law are referred to the UN's International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. According to Malcolm Shaw's research, the development of maritime law stimulated and advanced the general development of international law because of the creation of the legal concept of res communis wherein the seas were determined to be "accessible to all nations but incapable of appropriation," as a legal way to reconcile problems incurred by colonial empires scuffling over who claimed territorial dominion over vast portions of the oceans.2

The scale of the commonality shared by oceans and rivers may be enormous, but one could argue that any international laws, provisions or treaties regarding rivers would be very similar to that of oceans in principle. When it comes to rights claimed by "riparian nations"

(states that share the banks of an international river with other nations) to obstruct the flow of a river for their own development needs or desires, the issue of national sovereignty supersedes the struggles of riparian populations whose status falls outside of that sovereignty. In this sense 53 using a term like "international standards" regarding the construction of dams is really more akin to identifying ideals than anything more applicable and concrete -- also one of the common drawbacks that has plagued the legislation of International Law in the modern era.

Post-Conclusion

َٰ َو هَّللاُ أَن َز َل ِم َن ال هس َما ِء َما ًء فَأَ ْحيَا بِ ِه ا ْْلَ ْر َض بَ ْع َد َم ْوتِهَا ۚ إِ هن فِي َذلِ َك ََليَةً لِّقَ ْو ٍم يَ ْس َم ُعو َن

And Allah has sent down rain from the sky and given life thereby to the earth after its lifelessness. Indeed in that is a sign for a people who listen.

- The Holy Qu'ran, Surah 16:65

Stop, O people, that I may give you ten rules for guidance on the battlefield. Do not commit treachery or deviate from the right path. You must not mutilate dead bodies; do not kill a woman, a child, or an aged man; do not cut down fruitful trees; do not destroy inhabited areas; do not slaughter any of the enemies’ sheep, cow or camel except for food; do not burn date palms, nor inundate them; do not embezzle nor be guilty of cowardliness…You are likely to pass by people who have devoted their lives to monastic services; leave them alone."

- Quote attributed to the First Caliph Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, regarding conduct in war.1

During his speaking tour in early 2016 Paul Z. Simons recounted an experience he had during his trip to Rojava where a PYD party member said to him "I can't wait to turn today's freedom fighters into tomorrow's ecologists." This was said during a conversation in which the

Kurdish man was explaining to Simons how the PYD had plans to attempt to remedy the ecological problem caused by the poorly-maintained oil wells mentioned in the introduction to this paper. The PYD's plan, according Simons, was to physically extract the oil-contaminated soil from the area around the wells and transport the soil into concrete sarcophagi, where it would stay quarantined until it could be better disposed of, thus enclosing the contaminants and 54 prohibiting further contamination of the surrounding earth. The problem with this plan according to the PYD member was not human-power, as there were no shortage of enthusiastic young YPG and YPJ members willing to contribute their strength to this project. The problem was rather material in nature, with there not being enough concrete available locally to take on this task.

Thus one of many monumental projects of ecological cleansing is wistfully delagated to a hoped- for and dreamed-of postwar Syria.

It is my speculation that as the growth of global population converges with an intensifying world-wide ecological crisis, an urgent awareness of ecological desperation will steadily creep in many, if not most insurgencies, revolutions and resistance movements across the world, as well as taking a more open and center-stage position in the discourse and policies of the global empires and conglomerated power structures. Unfortunately, from the line of my speculation, the reason ecological awareness will come to the forefront will be because the crisis will be far too massive to ignore at this point. Various studies released by think-tanks such as the

Middle East Policy Council seem to state as much in their findings -- that the Middle East and

North Africa will become the epicenter of crippling heat waves and severe water shortages by the end of the 21st century, in levels of intensity that may make the annual pilgrimage to Mecca physically impossible for devout Muslims, and that freshwater shortages may become severe enough to necessitate the importation of fresh water to support the expected population growth.2,

3

The central commitment to ecology that is present in the writings of Abdullah Ocalan and the reverence for his philosophy that is held by the participants of the Rojava revolution and their counterparts in the PKK could be indicative of a growing prominence of ecological awareness and urgency within resistance movements around the world, placed alongside focused 55 insurgencies such as the Niger Delta Avengers in Nigeria (whose warfare is directed solely against the exploitative infrastructure of Chevron Oil in Nigeria)4, or those of indigenous resistance movements in the Amazon rainforest. Although it would be quite a stretch to call them

"ecologically focused" in any way, one can see some glimmers of this kind of thing in al-Qaeda, or more specifically in some of the statements released by Osama bin Laden in 2008 where he decried the environmental disasters brought by modern war and called for a "climate change development organization" guided by strict Islamic Law.5

Now it can be persuasively said that the establishment of Rojava in northern Syria has taken place in direct, antagonistic opposition to the Wahhabist cultural-imperialism of al-Qaeda and Daesh. The two varieties of anti-imperialist resistance have been locked in an existential struggle with each other for several years in Syria, Turkey and Iraq, and present themselves to represent diametric opposites to each other as alternatives to foreign colonial domination.

However, I would argue that it would be a misrepresentation of their respective struggles to characterize the animosity between Rojava and the "Caliphate" of Daesh to strictly be a struggle between a secular philosophy and a theocratic one. An examination of the political method of

Rojava reveals an emphasis on communal autonomy, and the emancipation of the commune from hierarchical authority outside of the community. This is how, in spite of the apparent secularism of the Rojava project, a political entity such as the Muslim Brotherhood finds a place in the patchwork of communities that make up the autonomous region of Rojava.

With this nuance in mind, Bin Laden's statements, despite coming from a worldview of bloodthirsty authoritarianism, hint at something containing an interesting potential that is worth consideration, especially for someone such as myself, coming from a western and American- educated background. Firstly, I would like to posit the idea (although arguably utopian) that 56 power is concentrated in the lives and day-to-day actions of communities rather than in the larger superstructures of states, state politics, religious hierarchies and so on. Secondly I would assert that traditions of all kinds have power inherent in their longevity -- I can think of no historical instance where enforced secularism alone has eradicated the pull of spiritual tradition, and also that the times where an attempt to do has occurred on a mass scale have resulted in failure to provide any kind of ultimate panacea for societal woes. So lest we, as outsiders to this part of the world, risk plummeting into some kind of Huntington-esque "clash of civilizations" position where we assume that only some kind of "rational", environmentally-conscious variant of

Western secularism is the answer to these problems, we must acknowledge that the practice of

Islamic Law as a legal and ethical standard is going to persistently remain in the places where it has been practiced for hundreds of years, and that agendas to try and suppress it will be met with the continual resistance that always rises in response to cultural imperialism.

Islamic Law is an old, complex and deeply layered tradition of ethical litigation. It is also, contrary to what American right-wingers or hardcore Salafist Islamists would have you believe, a continually evolving tradition. Thus it should come as no surprise that all contemporary issues that have found prominence in the 20th and 21st centuries can be found at the heart of some developing discourse within the various schools of Islamic Law. Ecology and environmental ethics are unsurprisingly no exception to this, with contemporary work by Islamic scholars such as Dr. Sayed Sikandar Shah Haneef, Nawal Ammar, Nomenul Haq, Fazlun Khalid and perhaps hundreds of others engaging with this very subject. All of them write of a foundational basis for environmental ethics in the Islamic tradition, a basis that could have applicable utility for how devout Muslims guide their actions and live their lives according to their faith 57

All of this here is written in speculative rumination, in considering possibilities for engaging with the great ecological crisis of our times in possible ways outside of an authoritarian narrative limited to a singular cultural context. The Syrian drought of the 2000s and its aftermath provides just one example in a sea of situations where terrible calamity breaks out when the essentials necessary for human survival are compromised. It can be surmised that there will be more displacement in the coming years, with food, water and shelter being central causes of conflict. When contemplating what the individual can do to engage with, or prepare for these possibilities, it seems that the most constructive approach to adopt would be that of taking each challenge one step at a time on a direct, experiential basis -- or in other words, a discipline or a practice, and encourage this in whatever way possible.

Endnotes

Introduction

1. Shaw, Malcolm N. International Law p. 10, 7th ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

State, Culture, Business and the Legacy of Colonialism 58

1. Information quoted from a recording of a talk given by Simons at Left Bank Books in Seattle, Washington in early 2016.

2. Hayward, Leslie. "Produced Water: An Expensive Problem for a Thirsty Fracking Industry." The Fuse. April 3, 2015. http://energyfuse.org/oil-and-water/.

3. Saviano, Roberto. "How the Mob Turned Southern Italy into a Toxic Wasteland." VICE. January 16, 2015. http://www.vice.com/read/the-mob-made-southen-italy-a-toxic-wasteland- 0000555-v22n1.

Mirages of Conflict

1. Van Dam, Nikolaos. The Struggle for Power in Syria: Politics and Society under Asad and the Ba'th Party. New York, NY: I.B. Tauris, 2011.

2. Makdisi, Karim. "The Rise and Decline of Environmentalism in Lebanon." In Water on Sand, 214. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

3. Al-Tamimi, Aymenn Jawad. "Looking at Alawites." The Levantine Review 1, no. 2, 9.

4. Khudr. "The Alawi Dilemma – Revisited." Syria Comment. January 20, 2011. http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/the-alawi-dilemma-–-revisited-by-khudr/.

Burdens of Responsibility

1. Francesco Femia and Caitlin Werrell, "Syria: Climate Change, Drought and Social Unrest.", The Center for Climate and Security, February 29th, 2012, accessed April 24th, 2016 https://climateandsecurity.org/2012/02/29/syria-climate-change-drought-and-social-unrest/

2. Colin P. 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 (2015): 3241, accessed April 16th, 2016, doi:10.1073/pnas.1421533112

3. Gary Nabhan, "Drought drives Middle Eastern pepper farmers out of business, threatens prized heirloom chiles", Grist, January 16 2010, accessed April 28th 2016, http://grist.org/food/2010-01-15-drought-drives-middle-eastern-peppers/

4. Francesca de Chatel, "The Role of Drought and Climate Change in the Syrian Uprising: Untangling the Triggers of the Revolution.", Middle Eastern Studies (2014): 4, doi:10.1080/00263206.2013.850076

5. Ibid p.5

59

6. Wadid Erian, Bassem Kaplan, Ouldbdey Babah, "Drought Vulnerability in the Arab Region: Special case study: Syria." Global Assesment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction, 2010: 1, accessed April 28th, 2016 http://www.preventionweb.net/english/hyogo/gar/2011/en/bgdocs/Erian_Katlan_&_Babah_2010 .pdf

7. Chatel, Ibid p.2

8. Ibid

9. Ibid

10. Ibid

11. Gianluca Serra, "The Northern Bald Ibis is extinct in the Middle East - but we can't blame it on IS.", The Ecologist, May 29th 2015, accessed April 28th 2016, http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2887380/the_northern_bald_ibis_is_extinct_in _the_middle_east_but_we_cant_blame_it_on_is.html

12: Chatel, Ibid p.3

Shallow Wells in the Deep State

1. Francesca de Chatel, "The Role of Drought and Climate Change in the Syrian Uprising: Untangling the Triggers of the Revolution.", Middle Eastern Studies (2014): 9, doi:10.1080/00263206.2013.850076

2. Haddad, Bassam. "Legacy of State-Business Antagonism." In Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience, 45. Stanford, CA: Standford University Press, 2012.

3. De Chatel p,6

4. Ibid

5. Anonymous. "The Syrian Revolution Is a Class War." Notgeorgesabra Archive. March 13, 2015. https://notgeorgesabraarchive.wordpress.com/2015/03/13/the-syrian-revolution-is-a-class- war/.

6. Saleeby, Suzanne. "Sowing the Seeds of Dissent: Economic Grievances and the Syrian Social Contract’s Unraveling." Jadaliyya. February 16, 2012. 60 http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/4383/sowing-the-seeds-of-dissent_economic-grievances- an.

7. Anonymous. "The Syrian Revolution Is a Class War." Notgeorgesabra Archive. March 13, 2015. https://notgeorgesabraarchive.wordpress.com/2015/03/13/the-syrian-revolution-is-a-class- war/.

8. Haddad, Bassam. "Legacy of State-Business Antagonism." In Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience, 87. Stanford, CA: Standford University Press, 2012.

9. Cit. 5 Ibid

10. Lund, Aron. "An Islamist Experiment: Political Order in the East Ghouta." Carnegie Endowment for International Peach. April 18, 2016. http://carnegieendowment.org/syriaincrisis/?fa=63362.

The damming of the Euphrates and the “Kurdish Question”

1. Peter Beaumont. "Restructuring of Water Usage in the Tigris-Euphrates Basin: The Impact of Modern Water Management Policies." Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Bulletin Series, 103 (1998): 168-70.

2. Natalie Arsenault, Christopher Rose, Allegra Azulay, and Jordan Phillips. "Introduction to the Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP)." People and Place: Curriculum Resources on Human- Environmental Interactions, April 2007, 6. http://www.utexas.edu/cola/hemispheres/.

3.Beaumont, p.172

4. Ibrahim Yuksel. "South-eastern Anatolia Project (GAP) Factor and Energy Management in Turkey." Energy Reports 1 (November 2015): 151-55. doi:10.1016/j.egyr.2015.06.002.

5. Ibid.

6. Information here primarily drawn from the Wikipedia entry on “Human Rights of Kurdish People in Turkey.” The page is heavily cited with dozens of news articles as well as organizations such as the European Court of Human Rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_of_Kurdish_people_in_Turkey

7. Bogumil Terminski. Development-Induced Displacement and Resettlement: Causes, Consequences, and Socio-Legal Context. Columbia University Press. 61

8. Hosheng Ose. "The PKK-Assad Regime Story: Harmony, Discord and Ocalan." NOW. April 10, 2014. Accessed May 10, 2016. https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentary/565108-the-pkk- assad-regime-story-harmony-discord-and-ocalan.

9. Beaumont, p.103-4

The Turkish Position

1. "The Face of Turkey’s Southeast Changes Thanks to GAP." Daily Sabah. November 9, 2014. http://www.dailysabah.com/nation/2014/11/09/the-face-of-turkeys-southeast-changes-thanks-to- gap.

2. 1. Francesca de Chatel, "The Role of Drought and Climate Change in the Syrian Uprising: Untangling the Triggers of the Revolution.", Middle Eastern Studies (2014): 7, doi:10.1080/00263206.2013.850076

3. Turkish Ministry of Foriegn Affairs. Water Issues Between Turkey, Iraq and Syria. Government Study.

4. Ibid

5. Ibid

6. Chatel p.7

Conclusion

1. Damascus, Syria. "2008 UN DROUGHT APPEAL FOR SYRIA." WikiLeaks. November 26, 2008. https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08DAMASCUS847_a.html.

Canonical ID: 08DAMASCUS847_a

2. Shaw, Malcolm N. "The Law of the Sea." In International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Post-Conclusion

1. Haneef, Sayed Sikandar Shaw, Dr. "Principles of Environmental Law in Islam." Arab Law Quarterly 17, no. 3 (2002): 241-54. 62

2. Amer, Pakinam. "A Chilling Vision of a Super-heated Gulf?" Nature Middle East. October 26, 2015. http://www.natureasia.com/en/nmiddleeast/article/10.1038/nmiddleeast.2015.197.

3. Russell, James A. "Environmental Security and Regional Stability in the Persian Gulf." Middle East Policy Council 16, no. 4 (2009). http://www.mepc.org/journal/middle-east-policy- archives/environmental-security-and-regional-stability-persian-gulf.

4. Anonymous. "Who Are the Niger Delta Avengers? Deep Sea Divers, Sophisticated Explosives, and Sabotage." Earth First! May 26, 2016. http://earthfirstjournal.org/newswire/2016/05/26/who-are-the-niger-delta-avengers-deep-sea- divers-sophisticated-explosives-and-sabotage/#more-50178.

5. "Osama Bin Laden Wanted Americans to Help Obama Save Humanity from Climate Change." VICE. March 2, 2016. https://news.vice.com/article/osama-bin-laden-wanted-americans-to-help- obama-save-humanity-from-climate-change.