Dedicated to Faraj Bayrakdar and Simon Nakze

0
Contents

Introduction p. 2

The War In Iraq p. 4

Climate Change and The Arab Spring p. 7

Climate Change and Global Refugeeism p. 10

Lessons Not Learned: Syria After 2011 p. 12

References p. 15

Written for the Amnesty International Studentengroep Leiden for the 5 th

anniversary of the Syrian Civil War. Written for the Amnesty

International Studentengroep Leiden for the 5th anniversary of the

Syrian Civil War.

Oscar Jäntti, 1.4. 2016

1
Cover Photo: Syrian boy in the Sukari neighbourhood, Aleppo, 2016. Photograph: Baraa Al-
Halabi/AFP/Getty Images.

Introduction

It might be hard to believe now, but the initial sentiments of the 2011 Arab Spring in
Syria were overwhelmingly optimistic. The spontaneous protests demanding amnesty
for political prisoners held by Bashar al-Assad had forced the dictatorship to make
modest concessions. The newfound atmosphere of hope and righteous outrage quickly
spread from the provincial cities of Dar’a and Homs to the suburbs of Damascus and
Aleppo. Even as the regime turned to increasingly violent methods to contain the
protests, over the summer the media reported almost weekly of a new city that had
risen up in resistance, or of a more and more senior government or army official
defecting to the opposition. Along with Obama, Cameron, and Erdogğ an, most of the
international community reasoned that he would end up alone and abandoned by his
troops once his financial reserves ran out. After all, this had been the fate of Gaddafi in
September, and that of Hosni Mubarak and Ben Ali earlier that year.

As we all now know, this didn’t happen. According to the UNHCR 50% of all
Syrians are now refugees, 8 million internally displaced and a further 4 million have
been forced to flee to ad-hoc camps in Turkey or Lebanon. Some 470 000 Syrians have
died. The long-standing myth that Europe is somehow insulated from the problems of
the Middle East is slowly crumbling, as nearly a million Syrians have fled their dismal
conditions to seek refuge in the EU, bolstering the rising nationalistic dissatisfaction that
has been brewing on the continent ever since the global financial meltdown of 2008.

This March marks the fifth anniversary of Bashar al-Assad murdering his own
people to curb the spreading protests. News outlets and NGOs have released several
evocative videos aimed at informing the public on the background of the crisis. But
nearly all of these primers contain a fundamental flaw: they present 2011 as Year Zero
of the conflict. It is almost always depicted as a force majeure, a superior, unforeseeable
act of God that could not have been predicted. When prior causes are discussed, they
overwhelmingly focus on the violence and militarism of the al-Assad regime. Although

2
the brutality of the al-Assads is undoubtedly the primary cause for the uprising, it was
both fuelled and sparked by factors outside the control of the dictatorship. Few
remember that in 2010 Syria played the role of Europe by hosting over 1.5 million Iraqis
fleeing sectarian violence. At the same time Syria was entering its third year of
debilitating drought, which had left farmers and food production in Syria devastated.
Approximately 1.5 million impoverished rural refugees flocked to the overcrowded
cities of urban Syria at the same time as the government was failing to cope with the
civilians fleeing Iraq. This dramatic rise in urban poverty and squalor provided the
perfect tinder for any spark to ignite. This spark finally came in the form of the Arab
Spring, itself provoked by global crop failures and surging food prices. Both of these
factors – unsuccessful US foreign policy and climate change – are critical for
understanding the current crisis befalling Syria and the world.

The aim of this piece is therefore to place the Syrian refugee crisis into context,
one shaped by both regional factors and global trends. It also seeks to identify how the
very same social, political and environmental forces that sparked the conflict in 2011
continue to live on, and feed the violence we witness today.

3
The War in Iraq

For most of the public, the Iraq War is ancient history. After all, the invasion took place
nearly thirteen years ago, and Iraq has failed to draw headlines ever since the United
States withdrew most of its forces in 2011. But from a historical point of view we are
still very much living the short-term effects of the oft-forgotten war. The Treaty of
Versailles in 1919 and the Nazi coup d’eé tat in 1933 are separated by fourteen years, but
nonetheless the latter is a short-term effect of the former. One of the more significant
long-term effects of Versailles, the Second World War, took nearly twenty years to
develop.

The United States invaded Iraq in 2003, ostensibly to disarm Saddam Hussein of
weapons of mass destruction. From the very get-go, the invasion was a mess. The
occupation of Baghdad was followed by weeks-long looting and destruction across the
city. The US air force had destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure, from roads and power plants
to the water supply. Iraq has never recovered from the wartime devastation: today 80%
of Iraqis lack access to sanitation, and 70% lack clean water in the increasingly hot
region.1 Electricity is available for only 5 hours a day, if even that. Small-scale business –
the dominant form of employment in the region – is either difficult or impossible under
these conditions.2 Basic indicators of human development, such as infant mortality
rates, have risen 150% from what they were under Saddam, partly due to the inability of
hospitals and other vital services to function properly without basic infrastructural
support.3

With the people traumatised and the country in ruins, what was needed was the
creation of basic public services and strong public sector to create some semblance of a
humane life and a functioning economy to desperate ordinary Iraqis. Instead of directly
rebuilding everyday services that the Iraqi people needed, the occupational government
largely outsourced the problem to private companies. Within four months of the
invasion, 100,000 non-military government employees were fired, Iraq’s 200 non-oil
sector state-companies were privatised, and the country was opened up to unlimited
imports without any tariffs or taxes. At the same time corporate tax was slashed from
40% to 15%, and new laws guaranteed that 100% of the profits could be taken out of

4
Iraq, with no requirement for foreign companies to reinvest in Iraq to help rebuild and
cut down unemployment.i 4

With little oversight, the rebuilding process quickly became rampant with
corruption, especially when it came to delivering essential public services such as
electricity to the Iraqi public. Companies would artificially extend construction times,
claim extra expenses, and bill the American public for services never rendered. Because
companies made money from billing the US government instead of providing for the
Iraqi public, they had no incentive to set up efficient or functional public services. 5 As
part of this neoliberal vision of a ‘modern, democratic’ Iraq, a stock exchange was set up
in June 2004, far before a normal life was made possible for the citizens of Iraq, or
anything resembling a real economy was established.

At the same time, the Bush administration was facing the question of long-term
governance in Iraq. A large motivation for ousting Saddam had been replacing an old
nemesis with a loyal and friendly government. Iraq is composed of three major ‘ethnic’
groups: 63% majority Shiite Arab in the oil-rich south, 20% minority Sunni Arab in the
west and centre, and a 17% Kurdish minority in the north. Saddam Hussein was a Sunni,
and although his socialist Ba’ath party was officially open to all Iraqis, his administration
heavily favoured the Sunni minority and violently persecuted Shiite and Kurdish
dissidents. What the US presumably hoped to achieve was to peacefully hand over
power from the Sunni minority to the Shiite majority in way that would allow both
groups to preserve their dignity and allay fears of each other.

What the Provisional Authority did in practice was the exact opposite. Thousands
of bureaucrats, judges, local administrators and ordinary people with links to Saddam’s
Ba’ath party were removed and barred from public office, even if they had no
connections to the atrocities of the past regime. The 400,000-man strong army, the
largest in the Middle East, was disbanded almost immediately. Paradoxically, they were
allowed to keep their guns even though they lost their jobs and pensions. 6 Amidst the
economic and social chaos following the invasion, the officers of this disbanded army
would form the core of a loyalist insurgency against the American occupation. In 2006
American and Iran orchestrated the Shiite Nouri al-Maliki to become prime minister. Al-
Maliki’s family had been persecuted for political activism by Saddam’s regime, and he
i Nonetheless the Saddam-era ban on trade unions and collective bargaining was upheld, cf. endnote 4.

5
further disenfranchised Sunnis in government in fear of a Ba’athist coup d’eé tat.
Unemployment, experiences of violence, bombings and the haphazard management of
the occupational administration created a general atmosphere of anxiety and chaos.
This provided the emerging sectarian resentment ample room to fester and to grow.

The problem of sectarian division increased as foreign, mainly Sunni, Jihadists

flocked to Iraq to confront their Great Enemy on the battlefield. Jihadist groups such as
Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) started out as relatively minor players in the nationalist
insurgency, but due to the devotion of their followers and sheer ruthlessness began to
play a larger role in the incipient insurgency. By the same token, the local milieu
influenced the Jihadist groups in Iraq. Al-Qaeda, headed at the time by Osama bin Laden,
placed its ideological focus on fighting ‘the Far Enemy,’ the United States and the West. ii
AQI quickly deviated from this ideology. Between 2004 and 2005, the insurgency mainly
targeted US forces and perceived collaborators. By 2006, AQI’s main targets were
ordinary Iraqi Shiites.7

In 2006 the latent tension between the most embittered Sunnis and revanchist
Shiite hawks reached its peak. On February 22 AQI bombed a major Shiite holy site in
Samarra, and hell broke loose. Radical Shiite strongmen and clerics reacted by
orchestrating retaliatory attacks on Sunni mosques, and mobilised death squads to
carry out ethnic cleansing in the neighbourhoods of Baghdad. Bodies were dumped in
Sunni and mixed areas, often decapitated or bearing obvious signs of torture. Sunnis
radicals, unable to match the Shiite militias in numbers, mounted a bombing campaign
of in Shiite neighbourhoods and holy sites across Iraq. In 2006 alone approximately 519
ordinary Iraqi civilians were killed per week – equivalent to over 5 weekly Bataclans, or
a 9/11 every month and a half. 8
3 million Iraqis have become refugees in their own
country, and nearly 200,000 civilians have died since the invasion. 9 The current crisis
facing Iraqi healthcare, education and governance has been amplified by the fact that
40% of the educated middle-class fled abroad by 2007. 10

Throughout Iraq’s descent into chaos, Syria was the only country that kept its
borders open for Iraqi refugees, and approximately 1.5 million Iraqis resultantly fled

ii Bin Laden’s mother was an Alawite Shiia from Syria, and he condemned attacking other Muslims, Sunni or
Shia, because he feared it would antagonise ordinary people against al-Qaeda. He also felt that Muslims should
focus their efforts on fighting their common enemy instead of each other.

6
there for safety. At the same time Syria was suffering from the worst draught in the
recorded history of the Middle East, which in turn was being spurred on by global
climate change.

Climate Change and The Arab Spring

Ever since the beginning of the Arab Spring in 2011, one question above all has
perplexed analysts: why 2011? The region had been plagued by violent dictatorships for
decades. Why such a sudden upheaval, and why did it spread so quickly? Though all the
causes of the Arab Spring are too numerous to list here, there is an emerging consensus
on one of its main triggers: global climate change.

Our deep reliance on fossil fuels to feed this growth is raising temperatures
across the globe in a completely unprecedented way. In 100 or so years, we have raised
the temperature of our planet by 1 degree. If we were to stop burning fossil fuels today,
global temperatures would still rise by 1.8 degrees. 2 degrees is the threshold that the
International Climate Change Panel considers to mark ‘irreversible damage to our
climate.’ 11

15 of the 16 hottest years measured in the past 136 years have taken place after
2000.12 Extreme weather events, such hurricanes, extended draughts, flooding and the
Pacific El Ninñ o and La Ninñ a, are increasing as our planet warms up. We are currently
witnessing the sixth great extinction event – the Anthropocene holocaust, named after
our species.iii The only organisms ever to have an equally dramatic effect on earth were
the bacteria that some 2.5 billion years ago began producing oxygen as a side product of
photosynthesis. Oxygen was toxic for most life on earth, and the first great extinction
event was triggered as the previously oxygen-free atmosphere turned poisonous for

iii Also referred to as the Holecene extinction event. Every day some 72-150 species go extinct which,
depending on one’s model, translates to an annual extinction rate of 10,000-50,000 species, though some cite
figures as large as 100,000. This is about 100 times more rapid than the geological ‘background’ rate of
extinction, which is itself subject to change depending on one’s approach. Although the exact figures are
disputed, the presence of a human-caused extinction event isn’t. cf. Ceballos et al, ‘Accelerated modern
human-induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction’ in Science Advances, 19.6.2015.

7
most life. Our species is a direct descent of the small handful of single-celled bacteria
that managed to adapt to the change.

By 2010, 1.5 million Iraqis had fled to peripheries of urban Syria. But they were
not alone, as Syria was dealing with its own domestic refugees escaping agricultural
collapse. From 2007 to 2010, Syria experienced the three worst draught years ever
recorded in the region. 13 In July-August 2010, right before the Arab spring erupted, the
temperature exceeded 40 degrees for 46 days in a row. By then, agriculture had become
impossible in larger parts of the country: in Syria’s Northeast alone 85% of the livestock
had died, and some 1.5 million farmers had abandoned their rural homes for Syria’s
overcrowded cities in hopes of a better life.14

When a farmer had previously earned about 500-800 US dollars from working
the land, they would now make some 200-300 dollars a month in semi-legal urban
industries, all the while trying to save up money to support their children and family. 15
Iraqis fleeing violence now had to compete with internally displaced Syrians for the
same low-paying and often illegal jobs, depressing wages and resultantly increasing
social tension. Syria’s urban population was just 8.9 million on the eve of the US invasion
in 2002. Before the Arab Spring in 2010, that number had grown by almost 5 million to
13.8 million. To quote the ground-breaking study that first highlighted the role of
climate change in the Syrian Civil War, “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.” 16

Syria’s 2007-2010 draught and long-term aridification are a symptom of this

changing climate.iv Not only is the Middle East is warm, but it has little rainfall, and it’s
becoming both hotter and drier. Like in Syria, draughts are becoming more frequent and
intense. Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent and the Nile might have functioned as the
great incubators of civilization some 10,000 years ago, but today the Middle East is the
world’s largest importer of food. Nearly 50% of the calories consumed by Egyptians are
imported. 17 Furthermore, 30% of overall Egyptian caloric intake comes from wheat. 18

iv As is usually the case, humans played a multi-layered role in the crisis. The al-Assads pursued an aggressive
program of agricultural expansion in the 1980s, which used up large amounts of groundwater and exacerbated
the water-shortage once the inevitable draught hit.

8
 As the global economy becomes more and more intertwined, crop failures and
environmental catastrophe on one side of the planet cease to be purely local problems
and metastasize into global ones. Volatile global food markets have a disproportionate
effect on the Middle East due to region’s reliance on food imports. Domestic food
shortages are exacerbated by the increasing volatility of foreign food production caused
by extreme weather. Most Middle Eastern states are also politically very fragile, relying
on a combination of top-down hierarchies and a promise of some modicum of material
well-being to control their populations. The fragile nature of these states means that
external shock – such as uncontrollably rising food prices – easily compounds with pre-
existing stressors such as authoritarian rule or local food shortage to tip the already
fragile social order over the edge.

2010 was a poor year for wheat and grain producers. Syria, Russia, Ukraine and
Argentina experienced severe draughts, and torrential rain destroyed crops in Canada,
Australia and Brazil.v Unsurprisingly, global food prices peaked to levels previously seen
only during the global financial collapse of 2008. 19 2010-2011 was exceptional in
another way as well: it marked the first time in human history that more people lived in
cities rather than the countryside. For comparison, only around 15% of the global
population was urban in 1900. Syria’s rapid urban growth was not unique. And not only
was the rapidly growing population increasingly urban, it was also younger than ever
before: 70% of the Arab world is under the age of 30. Syria, and the Arab world at large,
also suffered from crippling youth unemployment, creating a volatile mixture of
dissatisfaction caused by multiple factors. 20

Thus in 2010 the Middle East was younger and living in more urban than ever
before in history, living in crowded cities under violent and authoritarian governments
that failed to provide jobs or a future for their youth. Climate change-induced rise in
food prices was the spark that the set alight this dry tinder. It’s telling that the moment
the unrest in Tunisia couldn’t be held back by intimidation, Ben Ali’s regime lowered the
price of bread in hopes of placating the protesters. 21 vi
A seminal 2011 paper from the
New England Complex Systems Institute mapped out the relationship between global
v It is known that climate change greatly increases the likelihood of events like this, but proving direct
causation is harder. However, just this month a new study concluded with high confidence that the Russian
draught and heat wave that that struck in 2010 is linked to climate change. The heat wave in question killed
55,000 people in Russia alone.
vi “Bread, water, and no Ben Ali!” was one of the iconic slogans of the Tunisian Arab Spring.

9
food prices and unrest, and discovered a strong correlation between the two while the
Arab Spring was going on.22 In Syria the global food crisis worsened the pre-existing
agricultural and refugee crises that were plaguing the dictatorship, tipping it over the
edge.

The Climate and Global Refugeeism

It’s not only scientists who are seriously concerned about the relationship between
climate change and global conflicts. In 2003, a few months after the invasion of Iraq and
during the height of the War on Terror, a Pentagon reported highlighted climate change
as the single most serious threat to US security. Although the endpoint of the scenario it
sketches is rather fanciful (it involves multiple countries developing a nuclear deterrent
and traditional state-on-state violence instead of social order simply imploding), its
main predictions ring true for Syria:

“[We are to expect] 1) Food shortages due to decreases in net global agricultural
production 2) Decreased availability and quality of fresh water in key regions due to
shifted precipitation patters, causing more frequent floods and droughts… Military
confrontation may be triggered by a desperate need for natural resources such as
energy, food and water rather than by conflicts over ideology, religion, or national
honor… Over time though, conflicts over land and water use are likely to become more
severe – and more violent.” 23

A decade later in 2014, the US Department of Defence issued a report (cynically

titled Climate Change: Adaptation Roadmap) on how the US military should prepare for
violence spurred on by environmental instability: “The impacts of climate change may
cause instability in countries by impairing access to food and water, damaging
infrastructure, spreading disease, uprooting and displacing large numbers of people,
compelling mass migration, interrupting commercial activity, or restricting electricity
availability… These developments could undermine already-fragile governments that
are unable to respond effectively or challenge currently-stable governments.” 24

10
 As these reports predict, Syria is only one part of a larger global trend that unites
climate change with violence and refugeeism. The world currently is home to 60 million
refugees, more than ever before after the Second World War. 25
Today of those that flee
to Europe, the majority come from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. But in the past decade
Somalia and Eritrea were more represented in these figures, with Eritreans usually
being the third most common nationality to seek shelter in the EU. In fact, the whole
Gulf of Aden is experiencing something quite similar to Syria. Climatically, the Gulf of
Aden constitutes a complex interactive entity. The region is home to war-torn Somalia,
the hermit dictatorship of Eritrea (which regularly competes with North Korea for the
contentious title of worst place on Earth), Ethiopia, and Yemen, the poorest Arab
country. A recent study conducted by Columbia University analysed 40,000 years of
climactic data from the region came and to the conclusion the region will become drier
as the world becomes hotter (which is not always the case since heat has different
effects on different kinds of environments), and that draughts will become more
frequent and intense.26

This scenario is currently playing out at an alarming speed: the region is

currently experiencing a devastating draught. In Somalia, where 40% of GDP comes
from livestock, 35%-40% of all cattle have died and 240,000 people are at risk of famine.
27
Yemen in turn was hit by a cyclone last year, and like Syria it has descended into
chaotic warfare ever since the Arab Spring swept away its former dictator, Ali Abdullah
Saleh. The war in Yemen is heightened by an acute water shortage similar to that in
Syria – while Sana’a’s water table used to be 30 meters below the surface in the 1970s,
today it has dropped to 1.2 kilometres in some areas. 28
It is only four years ago in 2011
that a severe draught last hit the region. That time it killed 260,000 people in Somalia
alone. As in Syria, this is part of an escalating and intensifying pattern of climate-change
fuelled draughts and famine killing people and forcing migration onto people. As one
can imagine, draught and the violence that comes with it is seen in Europe as a spike in
refugees. The influx of Syrian refugees that Europe currently faces is only the most
prominent part of a larger picture, one where climate change slowly but surely
destabilises the most unstable and poor regions on earth, forcing people to flee to the
other side of the globe in order to survive.

11
Lessons not Learned: Syria after 2011

Not only did the Iraq war help promote instability in Syria, but the instability in Syria
has deepened the violence in Iraq. AQI had been all but crushed by 2010 through a
combination of American military intervention and ordinary Iraqis, Sunni and Shia,
pressuring local strongmen to halt the violence. But after sectarian tension picked up in
Iraq again around 2011, AQI re-emerged, and managed to capitalise on the increasingly
sectarian conflict in Syria. Today goes by a different name: ISIS.

Although we think of ISIS as the ‘Islamic State,’ it’s origins lie in the poorly
handled de-Ba’athification of Iraq. ISIS leadership is largely composed of former officers
and soldiers from Saddam’s army. The (now deceased) head of ISIS’ military operations
was a former intelligence officer in Saddam’s army, and the governor of ISIS’ Syrian
territories was an major general, to list a few. The ISIS troops currently holding Ramadi
near Baghdad are likewise former Ba’athists. In addition to brutality and poor pay,
Syrian ISIS turncoats routinely cite bitterness over being commanded by Iraqis and
maltreatment at their hands amongst motives for defection. 29
Many new ISIS officers
and rank-and-file soldiers see themselves as protectors of the Sunni in Iraq or Syria,
rather than global Jihadists aggressively fighting a decadent West. 30 vii

ISIS does include a large amount of Jihadists and certainly markets itself as such,
but it’s a complex and locally variable alliance, made up of Syrian and Iraqi tribal
leaders, ex-army officers, Jihadists, and Islamist nationalist gangs. ISIS is as an
organisation is Jihadist, but not all members of ISIS or the municipalities that pledge
allegiance to it are. By labelling it as a Jihadi threat on the West as opposed to what it
really is - a violent regional interest group that overwhelmingly murders local Muslims
and focuses only a fraction of its efforts on waging a war on the West - is precisely what
the group wants in order to create a strong identity for itself and bolster its standing to
attract international recruits. There is another level of tragedy at play here; although
ISIS is vicious and its violence is graphic, Bashar al-Assad’s regime has killed ten times

vii Just like al-Qaeda and the Taliban received American support and funding during the Soviet Invasion of
Afghanistan, in a twist of irony Syria’s government frequently aided former Saddam loyalists and AQI by
allowing them to coordinate themselves from Damascus and move insurgents from Syria to Iraq. Bashar al-
Assad was paranoid that the Americans would depose him after removing Saddam, and he hoped aiding the
insurgency would hasten American departure.

12
as many civilians as ISIS, and is the most violent destabilising force for ordinary Syrians.
31
Nonetheless, the vast majority of Western involvement has focused on ISIS, while
Turkey and Saudi-Arabia passively aid ISIS and fight Assad through Sunni nationalist
groups as violent and anti-Shiite as ISIS.

Despite sectarian violence in Iraq and the rise of ISIS acting as valuable lessons
on the short-sightedness of focusing on regime change instead of humanitarian needs
and social reconciliation, the US-led coalition did the opposite when it came to handling
Syria. The US, UK, Saudi-Arabia, Turkey and Qatar put all their efforts into funding anti-
Assad forces and toppling the government instead of protecting Syrian civilians or
preparing adequately for a massive dislocation of civilians. Once the expected
capitulation failed to materialise, no party has taken responsibility for caring for the
refugees fleeing the violence they have enabled in the region by flooding it with
weapons.

In the case of Turkey this is potentially catastrophic. Turkey now hosts some 2.5-
3 million Syrians, legally defined as ‘guests’ instead of ‘refugees’ to avoid legal
obligations that might require Turkey to provide for them. 2/3 of Syrian children in
Turkey don’t go to school, and their parents are legally barred from work. In 2014
Syrians working illegally made only 0.53 lira per hour, compared to the Turkish
minimum wage of 7.5 lira per hour. In one border town alone, Kilis, 4000 Syrian women
have been confirmed to have been sold as brides to locals. Turkey’s strategy seems to be
to make conditions intolerable for Syrians, and thus force them to Europe. But not all
will have the means to do so. With the Syrian Civil War dragging on and ISIS in the
neighbourhood, this is begging for mass radicalisation.

On a more insidious level, climate change remains unchecked. The Paris

conference in December provided the world with a chance to stave off what is possibly
the greatest challenge our species has ever faced. But Paris turned out to be a Munich, as
world leaders chose not to take any kind of meaningful action. As Syria demonstrates,
climate change is not an eventual and speculative threat: it is a concrete and present
one, wreaking havoc upon our species as we speak. Some of the petrostates that most
vociferously fought against a robust climate treaty – Russia, Saudi-Arabia, Qatar and Iran
– also happen to be the parties most ruthlessly furthering their own geopolitical

13
interests in Syria at the expense of innocent lives. Not only would abandoning fossil
fuels decrease the likelihood and frequency of new Syrias arising, but it would also
disenfranchise some of the most anti-humanitarian global actors that exacerbate and
seek to gain from such conflicts.

To paraphrase Niccoloò Machiavelli, one cannot predict fortune, fate, or the future.
One cannot predict when a flood will occur, but one can anticipate it, and build damns
and levies to counter or even harness it for one’s advantage. It is the lack of this kind of
active long-term thinking that permeates the string of events leading to Syria’s crisis,
from the Iraq War to climate change to the aftermath of Syria’s Arab Spring. Currently,
most global and regional powers are reactively trying to exercise damage control over
the mistakes they have made in the past. They might be it propping up their preferred
warring faction in the hopes that this will bring peace through the sword, or they might
tolerate innocent people who through no fault of their own were forced to flee home.
But none are taking the simple steps that are most likely to break the cycle of violence
and produce peace in the long run: creating safe zones for civilians in Syria to limit
human suffering, and taking action on climate change to ensure environmental stability
for our planet. Instead of tackling first causes, we are tackling symptoms.

As we move further away in time from these first causes, the more complex and
unpredictable their emergent secondary effects become. Through the rapid influx of
Syrian refugees, climate change is altering Europe’s political landscape for the worse.
Europe’s latent nationalism and xenophobia was first stirred awake by the massive
recession that came in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008. The rapid
arrival of unprecedented numbers of non-European refugees has played into the
paranoid fears of these nationalist factions, and by keeping national leaders busy with
bickering over relative non-issues they are preventing European leaders from
proactively tackling the root causes of the Syrian crisis, climate change and self-serving
geopolitics conducted by both Europe’s political allies and Europe’s adversaries. To gain
a glimpse of what the future of climate change looks like, look no further than Aleppo,
Calais, or your local Pegida rally.

References
14
1 Berman, Chantal, & Dewachi, Omar. ‘Iraqi Refugees.’ Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, February 2015.
Web. 19.2.2016
2 Al-Sahly, Suadad. ‘Shortage of electricity in Iraq cripples economy, sparks protests.’ Middle East Eye, 6.8.2015. Web,
19.2.2016.
3 Berman & Dewachi.
4 Klein, Naomi. ‘Baghdad year zero.’ Harper’s Magazine, September 2004. Web, 5.3.2016.
5 Jilani, Said. ’Joe Wilson to Hillary Clinton in 2010: Baghdad Has Been Bled to Death.’ The Intercept, 2.3.2016. Web,
4.3.2016
6 Sly, Liz. ‘The hidden hand behind the Islamic State militants? Saddam Hussein’s.’ The Washington Post, 4.4.2015. Web,
5.3.2016.
7 Hashim, Ahmed. ‘The Islamic State: From Al-Qaeda Affiliate to Caliphate.’ Middle East Policy, 21.4.2014. Web, 7.3.2016
8 Iraq Body Count. ‘Civilian deaths from violence in 2007.’ Iraq Body Count .Org, 1.1.2008. Web, 6.3.2016.
9 Miles, Tom. ‘U.N. says 13.6 million displaced by wars in Iraq and Syria.’ Reuters, 11.11.2014. Web, 5.3.2016. Note that the
figures are outdated, and are almost certainly higher by now.
10 Sanders, Ben & Merrill, Smith, 2007. ‘The Iraqi Refugee Disaster.’ World Policy Journal Vol. 24 No.3, 23-28.
11 Carbon Brief. ‘Two Degrees: The history of climate change’s speed limit.’ Carbon Brief, 8.12.2014.
12 Miller, Brandon. ‘2015 is hottest year on record, NOAA and NASA say.’ CNN, 20.1.2016. Web, 3.3.2016.
13 Furthermore, they were possibly the region’s three worst draught years in the past 900 years. Cook et al, 2016.
‘Spatiotemporal variability in the Mediterranean over the last 900 years.’ Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres,
4.4.2016. Web, 6.4.2016.
14 Lyon, Alistair, & Lawrence, Janet, eds. ‘Environmental disaster hits eastern Syria,’ Reuters, 15.11.2010. Web, 17.2.2016.
15 Hamid, Mustafa Abdul, in ‘Why This Syrian Refugee Farmer Left His Land’ by Augenbraun, Eliene. Scientific American,
17.12.2015. Web, 17.2.2016
16 Kelly et al, 2015. ‘Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and Implications of the recent Syrian draught,’ in PNAS Vol. 112
No. 11.
17 Zurayk, Rami. ‘Use your loaf: why food prices were crucial in the Arab spring.’ The Observer, 17.7.2011. Web, 10,7.2016.
18 UNICEF, 2012. Egypt Nutrition Landscape Analysis Report 2012. Web, 1.3.2016.
19 World Bank, February 2011. Food Price Watch report February 2011. Web, 23.2.2016.
20 Salti, Soraya. ‘Extended Interview: Soraya Salti.’ PBS, 2011. Web, 10.3.2016.
21 Zurayk 2011.
22 Lagi et al, 2011.’ The Food Crises and Political Instability in North Africa and the Middle East.’ New England Complex
Systems Institute, 10.8.2011. Web, 10.3.2015.
23 Schwartz, Peter, & Randall, Doug. ‘An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National
Security.’ The Pentagon, October 2003. Web, 23.2.2016.
24 The US Department of Defense, 2014. 2014 Climate Change: An Adaptation Roadmap. Washington D.C., US
Government Printing Office. Web, 19.2.2016.
25 UNHCR, 2015. World at War: UNHCR Global Trends Forced Displacement in 2014, 18.6.2015. Web, 7.3.2016.
26 Tierney et al, 2015. ‘Past and future rainfall in the Horn of Africa.’ Science Advances 9.10.2015. Web, 16.3.2016
27 Ní Chonghaile, Clár. ‘In Somaliland, climate change is now a life-or-death challenge.’ The Guardian 23.11.2015. Web,
28.2.2016.
28 Stephens, Paul. ‘Time running out of solution to water crisis.’ Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN),
13.8.2012. Web, 1.3.2016.
29 Sly, Liz. ‘Most of Islamic State’s leaders were officers in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.’ The Washington Post, 4.4.2016. Web,
22.3.2016.

30 Wilson, Lydia. ‘What I Discovered From Interviewing Imprisoned ISIS Fighters.’ The Nation, 21.10.2016. Web,
15.3.2016.
31 Syrian Network for Human Rights, 2016. The Most Significant Human Rights Violations in Syria during 2015 . Web,
20.3.2016.