The impacts of the drought can be seen across the country. In Idlib, the Duwaysat Dam’s reservoir has dried up for the first time in its 27-year history.

In Raqqa, the traditional Bedouin camel herders are faced with mass deaths due to starvation, forcing them to sell their herds off. Farmers in the region have also avoided sowing their fields in anticipation of a bad harvest, forcing them to rely on savings. Indeed, the Khabur River that many farmers in eastern Syria are relying on has almost completely dried up.

All of these factors are threatening to reverse the meagre developmental gains made in Syria over the past few years. Such reversals are not only risky for their own reasons, but can also put further pressure on the existing – but diminishing – resources, potentially resulting in clashes or outright conflict.

Furthermore, lack of water is detrimental in the fight against COVID-19, which presents a particularly heavy risk to the country due to the near-total collapse of the healthcare sector.

Today, many Arab states are looking to normalise ties with Damascus, leveraging reconstruction and other stability projects into geopolitical interests such as out-competing Iran. Any such investments, however, will need to take into account the worsening impacts of climate change and water scarcity. Absent such initiatives, Syria runs the risk of descending into further instability.

The Drought-Conflict Nexus

Syria is no stranger to conflict over water resources. During the rule of Hafez al-Assad, Syria and Turkey came perilously close to war over the latter’s plans to construct dams over the Euphrates. Although tensions fizzled in the ensuing years, the root causes were never truly addressed.

More recently, there has been a slew of literature suggesting that the Syrian conflict can legitimately be referred to as a “water war”. Such literature posits that the drought Syria experienced between 2006 and 2010 resulted in widespread desertification, loss of livelihoods – of as many as an estimated 800,000 people – and mass deaths of livestock. This period was recorded as the worst multiyear drought in 900 years and resulted in agriculture’s share in GDP falling from 25% in 2003 to 17% in 2008. During this time, there were sharp rises in food and livestock prices, the displacement of 1.5 people from rural regions to cities that resulted in population shocks, and a need for Syria to import wheat for the first time since the 1990s when self-sufficiency was declared.

The notion that the war in Syria is a water war has been controversial. However, the added stresses from the drought almost certainly had corrosive knock-on effects on the economic dimensions of the Arab Spring protests when they broke out over ten years ago. Research on the financing and recruitment strategies of the Islamic State (IS) made it clear that the group exploited farming communities in both Iraq and Syria to recruit vulnerable, isolated populations to their cause, a tactic even adopted by the IS’ predecessors. Indeed, even in the late 2000s, farming communities in central Iraq that had been severely impacted by years of political neglect and increasing problems wrought by climate change were targeted for recruitment by jihadist groups.

Elsewhere in the MENA region, the increasingly-volatile spat between Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt over the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), accompanied by threats of military action, highlights the further destabilising impacts on water insecurity.

What Are the Causes?

For those in northern Syria, especially in the areas governed by the Autonomous Administration (AA), Turkey is the culprit for the water woes. Over the past years, Ankara, through the forces it supports, has been accused of blocking the flow of the Khabur River. New Turkish dams built along the Tigris and Euphrates have also brought back the unresolved tensions between Turkey, Iraq and Syria. It would be easy to suggest that without the new Turkish dams (or, in the case of Ethiopia, GERD), water resources would not be a subject of conflicts.

However, with Turkey and Jordan experiencing severe droughts, record temperature highs across the MENA region this summer, and the prevalence of Syrian droughts prior to the dam issues, this suggests other forces such as climate change are at play. Indeed, climate change experts warn that the MENA region is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, and may become uninhabitable by the year 2100.

All of these developments will have severe knock-on effects: As water resources diminish, competition and clashes – like those we are presently seeing along the Khabur River, will increase. For those living in the peripheries, loss of income from farming and herding will either force them to move, or force them to seek livelihoods through other means, including smuggling or crime. At worst, they can be the perfect recruitment targets for extremist groups like the IS, will continue to target them for recruitment.

Furthermore, a decade of conflict has wreaked havoc on Syrian infrastructure. Water, electricity, healthcare and other capacities have all severely diminished since 2011, leaving the scope for effective responses by any governing body in Syria likely unable to meet the scale of the crisis.

The Impact of Normalisation With Gulf States

All these developments come at a time when Arab states are increasingly looking to normalise their ties with Damascus, bringing the country “back into the Arab fold”. The logic supposes that a decade of isolation has not brought down Bashar al-Assad but entrenched Iranian influence in the country. It seems that some Gulf Arab states, the United Arab Emirates in particular, have shifted to a strategy of leveraging their financial clout to out-compete Iran in Syria through investments, especially in reconstruction. Regional developments, such as the Lebanese crisis, also appears to have compelled local and global powers to give Damascus more leeway. For Damascus – and by extension, Moscow – these developments represent the perfect opportunity to show that only their side can guarantee stability and improvement to Syrian lives despite the well-placed concerns among humanitarian activists that such a move would “rehabilitate” Bashar al-Assad.

However, reconstruction projects cannot succeed without water security and effective management of natural resources. Syria’s electricity grid, for example, relies heavily on dams such as Tishreen and Tabqa. The loss of water in the reservoirs of these dams already resulted in rolling blackouts over the course of 2020. The reliance of fuel on power generators, in turn, had knock-on effects on fuel availability, highlighting the importance of water security in maintaining any semblance of industrial capacity required for the type of reconstruction projects Syria needs.

If Gulf countries, especially the UAE, which has been especially sanguine about recovering investments from Syria, invest in reconstruction projects without accounting for climate change and water security, they could end up losing far more than they will gain.

For its part, the UAE is quite well-positioned to tackle a water crisis. Given that the country is highly arid, it has invested heavily in desalination technologies. Today, most of the UAE’s potable water comes from some 70 desalination plants in the country. Globally, the UAE accounts for 14% of the world’s total production of desalinated water, with plans to further improve capacity.

Water management technologies such as these, while not enough to reverse the impacts of climate change, can offer a much-needed respite for many Syrians who are already losing their livelihoods to water scarcity.

To be sure, desalination is neither a quick, nor a perfect solution. It is an extremely power intensive and very expensive process, relying not only on emergent technology, but also on efficient water and power management infrastructure across the grid. Syria today has none of these things.

However, the fact remains that the alternative in the form of a drought-fuelled refugee crisis and conflict over diminishing resources is far less attractive for anyone involved.

The global agenda has become increasingly conscious about the effects of climate change and impacts of human activity on the world. The COVID-19 pandemic itself has contributed to such a shift in consciousness. Meanwhile, although the recently-concluded COP26 summit was widely derided as a failure by activists for failing to result in any binding agreements, it has nevertheless allowed for discussions around policy options that were not even scantly considered a few years ago.

In Syria, where there are few positive options, the convergence of geopolitical interests can create the room for more climate change-focused policies that focus on reversing environmental degradation and the improved management of water resources.

As Turkey and the Gulf states show signs of moving past the enmity that defined the past half a decade, there is room for their interests to converge in the matter of climate change, perhaps even creating a room for a multilateral mechanism to help Turkey, Iraq and Syria to manage their water resources without infringing on one-another’s national interests and security, preventing the periodic flare-ups of tensions that plagued the relations of all three countries. Such a multilateral mechanism can even come to benefit neighbouring countries like Jordan and Lebanon and even pave the way for a similar arrangement between Sudan, Ethiopia and Egypt who came to the brink of war over GERD.

Ultimately, there are no “silver bullet” solutions here. However, any solution that fails to take water scarcity and climate change into account will see Syria falling into further destitution and conflict.