40 YEARS OF FURY

Syrias weewee crisis is largely of its own making. natural c e actuallyplaceing in the 1970s, the military politics led by death chair Hafez al-Assad launched an ill-conceived drive for outlandish self-sufficiency. No mavin seemed to go steady whether Syria had sufficient ground body of water system and rainfall to vacate those crops. Farmers made up water shortages by drilling come up to tap the countrys underground water reserves. When water tables retreated, people dug deeper. In 2005 the regime of Assads parole and successor, President Bashar al-Assad, made it illegitimate to dig new come up without a license issued personally, for a fee, by an decreed tho it was mostly ignored, out of necessity. Whats happening globallyand departicularly in the meat easternis that groundwater is going down at an alarming rate, says Colin Kelley, the PNAS studys lead author and a PACE postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Its almost as if were drivi ng as fast as we burn down toward a cliff.\nSyria raced straight over that precipice. The war and the drought, they atomic number 18 the selfsame(prenominal) thing, says Mustafa Abdul Hamid, a 30-year-old farmer from Azaz, b directing Aleppo. He talks with me on a warm good afterwardnoon at Kara Tepe, the main camping for Syrians on Lesbos. Next to an outside spigot, an olive tree is mantled with drying baby clothes. Two boys rivulet among the rows of tents and temporary shelters playing a game of war, with sticks for imaginary guns. The fix of the revolution was water and land, Hamid says.\n \nLouy al-Sharani, 25, explains wherefore people flee. There are a million slipway to die in Syria, and you female genital organt imagine how pitiful they are. Videographer/Interviewer/Photographer: John Wendle; manufacturing business: Eliene Augenbraun\n \nLife was good in front the drought, Hamid recalls. Back home in Syria, he and his family farmed three hectares of topsoil s o rich it was the excuse of henna. They grew stalk, fava beans, tomatoes and potatoes. Hamid says he used to crop three quarters of a metric ton of wheat per hectare in the eld forrader the drought. Then the rains failed, and his yields plunged to barely one-half that amount. All I unavoidable was water, he says. And I didnt project water. So things got very bad. The government wouldnt give up 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 duty period full of cash, he could go on digging with no interference. If you bring the money, you assume the permissions you take fast, he explains. If you dont have the money, you can waiting three to five months. You have to have friends. He manages a smile, weakened by his condition. His figment raises an early(a) long-standing grievance that contributed to Syrias downfall: pervasive official corruption.\nSyrians generally viewed thieving cultured servan ts as an inevitable part of life. After more than quadruplet decades under the two Assad family totalistic regimes, people were resigned to all kinds of hardship. simply a critical multitude was developing. 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 in advance the U.S. invasion 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 study: The rapidly increase urban peripheries of Syria, marked by illegal settlements, overcrowding, poor infrastructure, unemployment and crime, were neglected by the Assad government and became the meat of the developing unrest.\nBy 2011 the water crisis had pushed those frustrations to the limit. Farmers could survive one year, possibly two years, but after three years their resources were exhausted, says Richard Seager, one of the PNAS studys co- authors and a professor at capital of South Carolina Universitys LamontDoherty Earth Observatory. They had no ability to do anything other than leave 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 Spring uprisings swept the Middle East. In Syria, protests grew, crackdowns escalated and the country erupted with 40 years of pent-up fury.\n \n steal Show: The Dangerous passing of Syrias Climate Refugees. Photograph by John WendleIf you want to get a full essay, order it on our website:

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