kravietz 🦇The bloody war in #Syria has started so long ago that most of us don’t really remember how it started. Here’s text by Polish journalist Marcin Ogdowski based on input from Wojciech Wilk, former UN missions member who frequently visited the country in the past.[^1]
Let’s start with the drought that hit Syria between 2006 and 2010. In the last two years of the crisis, the usually mighty Euphrates was the width of a stream in many places, and some of its branches dried up completely. UN estimates showed that two million people lost their sources of income, one and a half million of them moved to cities in the west of the country. The same ones that became the main centres of the revolt in 2011. Frustrated, hopeless and often hungry people are the ideal resource from which any revolution draws its strength….
The drought would not have been so troublesome had it not been for a social experiment undertaken by the Syrian authorities in the 1960s. The ‘old Assad’ regime intended to monetise the country, which meant persecuting the Kurdish minority and, among other things, displacing them from the semi-arid and desert areas of eastern Syria. The hitherto Kurdish settlements were populated by Arabs who, instead of cultivating the fields in the river valleys, turned to what they had always known: pastoralism and animal husbandry. The result was a massive depletion of the land, made worse by the fact that few irrigation systems had been built - most fields were rain-fed. When this ran out, agricultural production collapsed. Lack of water and fodder caused the extinction of gigantic herds, piling up the effects of the crisis.
As if this were not enough, there were at least one million (and according to Syrian sources, as many as two million) refugees from neighbouring Iraq in the country. Refugees who fled the brutal civil war that followed the US military intervention. For Syria of 20 million people, with its inefficient and unclimactic economy, this was a major burden.
And so we come to Assad’s authoritarian tendencies. In March 2011, in the city of Daraa, police detained several 13-year-olds. They were about to write the slogan ‘get out’, allegedly referring to the authorities, on the walls. The boys fell into the hands of the perpetrators, who ripped out their fingernails and broke their ribs. ‘You won’t see the children again’, promised the parents of those imprisoned by the local security chief. On 15 March, people took to the streets - and immediately started shooting at them. The brutal pattern was repeated in subsequent demonstrations, this time in honour of the murdered. But even then Assad had enough popular support to extinguish the conflict. He didn’t extinguish it - he chose a solution tested at one time by his father (in Hama, in 1982). He surrounded the city with troops, starving it and firing artillery; this is how he wanted to break the unruly. Unluckily for him, Dara became a symbol and an example, carrying the charge of rebellion to other towns. What happened next you already know.
[^1]: https://bezkamuflazu.pl/zrodla-syryjskiego-dramatu/ (in Polish)
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