Tag Archives: Civil war in Syria

Climate Change, Syria

Study reveals that climate change may have triggered the civil war in Syria…

SYRIA, CIVIL WAR & CLIMATE CHANGE

Intro: Severe drought may have contributed to the uprising. Research conducted by scientists at Columbia University in New York say that the influx of people into cities that has caused rising poverty and unrest was a major contributory factor that led to the civil war which started in 2011.

Drought caused by climate change may have pushed Syria towards the devastating civil war currently ripping the country apart, according to researchers.

A new study has found that many parts of the country were hit by a record dry period between 2006 and 2010 which may have propelled the uprising against the Syrian regime in 2011.

The drought, which scientists say was likely made worse by climate change, destroyed much of the agriculture in the north of the country, driving farmers into cities.

The conflict has since escalated into a complex war involving extremist Islamic groups including ISIS and forces from other nations including the US.

An estimated 200,000 people have now been killed and an estimated nine million Syrians have fled their homes since the outbreak of the war.

Dr Richard Seager, a climate scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York, said: ‘We’re not saying the drought caused the war.

‘We’re saying that added to all the other stressors, it helped kick things over the threshold into open conflict.

‘A drought of that severity was made much more likely by the ongoing human-driven drying of that region.’

The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said that the 2006-2010 drought was the worst and longest on record compared to those in the 1950s, 1980s and 1990s.

Particularly hard hit was the Fertile Crescent that spans Syria, Turkey and Iraq.

Since 1900 the area has undergone warming of between 1 degree C and 1.2 degrees C and rainfall in the wet season has fallen by 10 per cent.

The researchers said the trend matched that predicted by models of climate change caused by human carbon dioxide emissions.

They said that the wind patterns bringing rain from the Mediterranean weakened while higher temperatures caused greater evaporation of moisture from the soils during the summer.

This caused agricultural production to plunge by a third in Syria.

Combined with a growing population –from four million in the 1950s to 22 million now – this led to increasing levels of poverty and pressure within the country’s urban areas.

The researchers said that Bashar al-Assad’s regime also encouraged water intensive crops like cotton for export while illegal drilling of irrigation wells rapidly depleted groundwater.

In the worst hit north east areas of the country, livestock herds were practically obliterated, cereal prices doubled and nutrition-related diseases among children increased dramatically. This led to 1.5 million people moving from the countryside to the cities.

Writing in the journal, the authors said: ‘Rapid demographic change encourages instability.

‘Whether it was a primary or substantial factor is impossible to know, but drought can lead to devastating consequences when coupled with pre-existing acute vulnerability.’

It is the first study of its kind to look at how climate change has played a role in a current war.

Professor Solomon Hsaing, a public policy researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, said similar climatic changes had triggered the collapse of the Akkadian Empire in the region 4,200 years ago following a drought lasting several years.

However, Marshall Burke, an environmental scientist at Stanford University, said: ‘There were many things going on in the region and world at that time, such as high global food prices and the beginning of the Arab Spring, that could have also increased the likelihood of civil conflict.’

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Foreign Affairs, Russia, Syria, Ukraine, United Nations, United States

The west’s inaction in Syria highlights the impotence of the international community…

SYRIA

The West’s inability (or even insouciance) in becoming embroiled to counter the aggression of the regime of Bashar al-Assad against his own people in Damascus has led to the crumbling of resistance in the city. It was here that the rebel army had its stronghold. The evacuation of Homs is the personification of Western diplomatic failure.

It was a year ago now when the appalling bloodshed and mayhem of the civil war in Syria drew unanimous condemnation from the West. Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people last August added to the anger as the ‘red lines’ pronounced previously by President Obama had been crossed. America insisted that would trigger a military intervention in the event of that happening. But politicians then baulked as the Labour Party in Britain defeated the Government in the House of Commons on proposed military intervention. Those feelings rippled across to the United States, as politicians on either side of the Atlantic became forced into embracing a new isolationism born of years of war weariness in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The result has been a rebellion that can justly claim to have been let down by a collective failure of will in the West. It is a failure which could yet bear bitter fruit in Islamist anger exported by the disillusioned Syrian rebel fighters to the wider world. With the death toll spiralling with at least 150,000 dead, it is right to ask what has happened.

In looking for an answer, we should focus on two countries which have kept the Assad regime afloat for their own narrow and precarious interests – Iran and Russia. Tehran’s religious Ayatollah’s see Assad as an essential Shia bulwark against the power of Sunni forces in the region. Vladimir Putin’s motivation is as much to do with Russia’s current power games with the West as it is with the Syrian conflict on its own terms.

It was Mr Putin’s intervention last autumn that halted Western military action against Assad’s forces, preventing the opportunity that a decisive intervention could have brought by affording the rebels a chance to triumph. They needed at least to have secured a corner of a divided and disparate nation. Whilst the regime’s chemical weapons and capabilities appears to be on-course for being dismantled by the UN set deadlines, the cost – a real and tangible one in terms of geopolitics – has been the survival and, indeed, the strengthening of Assad’s reign in power, as its poorly-equipped rebel opponents fade. Recently, for instance, the Syrian tyrant has spoken of holding on to power for another six years, inconceivable to the West who had all but in name considered regime change a fundamental tenet in Syria three years ago.

President Putin’s observations would have noted the West’s stalemate and inaction in Syria, as well as calculating a likely similar reticence on intervention elsewhere by both Washington and London. The annexation of Crimea and continued power games in Ukraine, particularly in the east of the country, are proof of that.

Mr Putin, clearly emboldened, regards the West as weak. There is no real counter to Russian aggression and expansionism, other than the ranking up of political rhetoric by Western leaders. Yet, the harder Mr Putin acts abroad the stronger his position at home has become, where growing nationalist sentiment has garnered support for their president’s actions – a useful distraction given Russia’s floundering economy and weakening currency, clear effects of western imposed sanctions.

The rebels of Homs will be one of many aggrieved by the West’s inaction in Syria.

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