40 YEARS OF FURY

Syrias water crisis is for the most part of its own making. concealment in the 1970s, the military governing conduct by electric chair Hafez al-Assad launched an ill-conceived drive for agricultural self-sufficiency. No oneness seemed to consider whether Syria had suitable groundwater and rainfall to raise those crops. Farmers do up water shortages by drilling wells to pat the countrys metro water reserves. When water tables retreated, state dug deeper. In 2005 the regime of Assads son and successor, President Bashar al-Assad, made it prohibited to flip new wells without a license issued personally, for a fee, by an officialbut it was in the main ignored, out of necessity. Whats accident globallyand particularly in the Middle Eastis that groundwater is expiry down at an fearful rate, says Colin Kelley, the PNAS excogitates reach author and a dance step postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Its almost as if were driving as sp repealth rift as we can to state of ward a cliff.\nSyria raced straight over that precipice. The war and the drought, they are the same thing, says Mustafa Abdul Hamid, a 30-year-old farmer from Azaz, near Aleppo. He talks with me on a warm afternoon at Kara Tepe, the main camp for Syrians on Lesbos. Next to an outdoor spigot, an chromatic tree is draped with drying bollix clothes. Two boys run among the rows of tents and temp shelters playing a wager of war, with sticks for imaginary guns. The start of the renewal was water and land, Hamid says.\n \nLouy al-Sharani, 25, explains why mess flee. There are a million ways to evanesce in Syria, and you cant imagine how ugly they are. Videographer/Interviewer/ photographer: fanny Wendle; Producer: Eliene Augenbraun\n \nsprightliness was good before the drought, Hamid recalls. Back home in Syria, he and his family farmed triple hectares of topsoil so rich it was the color of henna. They grew wheat, fava beans, tomatoes and potatoes. Hamid says he used to harvest triplet quarters of a system of measurement ton of wheat per hectare in the eld before the drought. thus the rains failed, and his yields plunged to barely half that amount. alone I needed was water, he says. And I didnt need water. So things got very bad. The governance wouldnt allow us to drill for water. Youd go to prison.\nFor a while, Ali was luckier than Hamid: he had connections. As long as he had a sack wax of cash, he could go on digging with no interference. If you work out the money, you get the permissions you need fast, he explains. If you dont pass the money, you can wait threesome to five months. You generate to aim friends. He manages a smile, washed-out by his condition. His story raises another(prenominal) long-standing grievance that contributed to Syrias tumble: pervasive official corruption.\nSyrians more often than not viewed thieving civil servants as an inevitable part of life. after(prenominal) more than four decades on a lower floor the ii Assad family totalitarian regimes, race were resigned to all kinds of hardship. But a critical mass was ontogeny. In recent years Iraqi War refugees and displaced Syrian farmers have inundated Syrias cities, where the urban population has ballooned from 8.9 million in 2002, just before the U.S. attack of Iraq, to 13.8 million in 2010, toward the end of the drought. What it meant for the country as a whole was summarized in the PNAS theater of operations: The rapidly growing urban peripheries of Syria, marked by illegal settlements, overcrowding, poor infrastructure, unemployment and crime, were neglected by the Assad government and became the heart of the developing unrest.\nBy 2011 the water crisis had pushed those frustrations to the limit. Farmers could break one year, maybe two years, but after three years their resources were exhausted, says Richard Seager, one of the PNAS studys co-authors and a prof at Columbia Universitys LamontDoherty Earth Ob servatory. They had no might to do anything other than generate their lands.\nHamid agrees. The drought lasted for years, and no one said anything against the government. Then, in 2011, wed had enough. There was a revolution. That February the Arab leaping uprisings swept the Middle East. In Syria, protests grew, crackdowns escalated and the country erupted with 40 years of pent-up fury.\n \nSlide demo: The Dangerous Passage of Syrias mode Refugees. Photograph by John WendleIf you want to get a full essay, order it on our website:

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