Reblogged from http://www.timesofisrael.com/lack-of-water-sparked-syrias-conflict-and-it-will-make-egypt-more-militant-too/
Prof. Arnon Sofer sets out the link between drought, Assad’s civil war, and the wider strains in the Middle East; Jordan and Gaza are also in deep trouble, he warns
May 9, 2013, 6:57 pm
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Some look at the upheaval in
Syria through a religious lens. The Sunni and Shia factions, battling
for supremacy in the Middle East, have locked horns in the heart of the
Levant, where the Shia-affiliated Alawite sect has ruled a majority
Sunni nation for decades.
Some see it through a social prism. As
they did in Tunis with Muhammad Bouazizi — an honest man who couldn’t
make an honest living in this corruption-ridden part of the world — the
social protests that sparked the war in Syria started in the poor and
disenfranchised parts of the country.
And others look at the eroding boundaries of
state in Syria and other parts of the Middle East as a direct result of
the sins of Western hubris and Colonialism.
Professor Arnon Sofer has no qualms with any
of these claims and interpretations. But the upheaval in Syria and
elsewhere in the Middle East, he says, cannot be fully understood
without also taking two environmental truths into account: soaring
birthrates and dwindling water supply.
Over the past 60 years, the population in the
Middle East has twice doubled itself, said Sofer, the head of the
Chaikin geo-strategy group and a longtime lecturer at the IDF’s top
defense college, where today he heads the National Defense College
Research Center. “There is no example of this anywhere else on earth,”
he said of the population increase. Couple that with Syria’s water
scarcity, he said, “and as a geographer it was clear to me that a
conflict would erupt.”
Arnon
Sofer, a longtime professor at the IDF’s National Defense College, sees
a link between the war in Syria and the water shortages there (Photo
credit: Moshe Shai/ Flash 90)
The Pentagon cautiously agrees with this
thesis. In February the Department of Defense released a “climate-change
adaptation roadmap.” While the effects of climate change alone do not
cause conflict, the report states, “they may act as accelerants of
instability or conflict in parts of the world.” Predominantly the paper
is concerned with the effects of rising seas and melting arctic
permafrost on US military installations. The Middle East is not
mentioned by name.
But Sofer and Anton Berkovsky, who together
compiled the research work of students at the National Defense College
and released a geo-strategic paper on Syria earlier in the year, believe
that water scarcity played a significant role in the onset of the
Syrian civil war and the Arab Spring, and that it may help re-shape the
strategic bonds and interests of the region as regimes teeter and
borders blur. Sofer also believes that a “Pax Climactica” is within
reach if regional leaders would only, for a short while, forsake their
natural inclinations to wake up in the morning and seek to do harm.
Syria is 85 percent desert or semi-arid
country. But it has several significant waterways. The Euphrates runs in
a south-easterly direction through the center of the country to Iraq.
The Tigris runs southeast, tracing a short part along Syria’s border
with Turkey before flowing into Iraq. And, aside from several lesser
rivers that flow southwest through Lebanon to the Mediterranean, Syria
has an estimated four to five billion cubic meters of water in its
underground aquifers.
From 2007-2008, over 160 villages in Syria were abandoned and some 250,000 farmers relocated to Damascus, Aleppo and other cities. The capital, like many of its peer cities in the Middle East, was unable to handle that influx of people. Residents dug 25,000 illegal wells in and around Damascus, pushing the water table ever lower and the salinity of the water ever higher.
For these reasons the heart of the country was
once an oasis. For 5,000 years, Damascus was famous for its agriculture
and its dried fruit. Since 1950, however, the population has increased
sevenfold in Syria, to 22 million, and Turkey, in an age of scarcity,
has seized much of the water that once flowed south into Syria.
“They’ve been choking them,” Sofer said,
noting that Turkey annually takes half of the available 30 billion cubic
meters of water in the Euphrates. This limits Syria’s water supply and
hinders its ability to generate hydroelectricity.
In 2007, after years of population growth and
institutional economic stagnation, several dry years descended on Syria.
Farmers began to leave their villages and head toward the capital. From
2007-2008, Sofer said, over 160 villages in Syria were abandoned and
some 250,000 farmers – Sofer calls them “climate refugees” – relocated
to Damascus, Aleppo and other cities.
The capital, like many of its peer cities in
the Middle East, was unable to handle that influx of people. Residents
dug 25,000 illegal wells in and around Damascus, pushing the water table
ever lower and the salinity of the water ever higher.
This, along with over one million refugees
from the Iraq war and, among other challenges, borders that contain a
dizzying array of religions and ethnicities, set the stage for the civil
war.
Tellingly, it broke out in the regions most
parched — “in Daraa [in the south] and in Kamishli in the northeast,”
Sofer said. “Those are two of the driest places in the country.”
Professor Eyal Zisser, one of Israel’s top
scholars of Syria, agreed that the drought played a significant role in
the onset of the war. “Without doubt it is part of the issue,” he said.
Zisser did not believe that water was the central issue that inflamed
Syria but rather “the match that set the field of thorns on fire.”
Rebel
troops transporting two women to safety along the Orontes River, which
has shrunk in recent years and grown increasingly saline (Photo credit:
CC BY FreedomHouse)
Since that fire began to rage in March 2011,
the course of the battles has been partially dictated by a different
sort of logic, not environmental in nature. “Assad is butchering his way
west,” Sofer said. He believes the president will eventually have to
retreat from the capital and therefore has focused his efforts on Homs
and other cities and towns that lie between Damascus and the Alawite
regions near the coast, cutting himself an escape route.
Sofer and Berkovsky envision several scenarios
for Syria. Among them: Assad puts down the rebellion and remains in
power; Assad abdicates and a Sunni majority seizes control; Assad
abdicates and no central power is able to assert control. The most
likely scenario, Sofer said, was that the Syrian dictator would
eventually flee to Tehran. But he preferred to avoid that sort of
micro-conjecture and to focus on the regional effects of population
growth and water scarcity and the manner in which that ominous mix might
shape the future of the region.
Writing in the New York Times from Yemen
on Thursday, Thomas Friedman embraced a similar thesis, noting that the
heart of the al-Qaeda activity in the region corresponded with the
areas most stricken by drought. Sofer published a paper in July where he
laid out the grim environmental reality of the region and argued that,
as in Syria, the conflicts bedeviling the region were not about climate
issues but were deeply influenced by them.
Egypt, Sofer wrote, faces severe repercussions
from climate change. Even a slight rise in the level of the sea – just
half a meter – would salinize the Nile Delta aquifers and force three
million people out of the city of Alexandria. In the more distant
future, as the North Sea melts, the Suez Canal could decline in
importance. More immediately, and of greater significance to Israel, he
wrote that Egypt, faced with a water shortage, would likely grow more
militant over the coming years. But he felt the militancy would be
directed south, toward South Sudan and Ethiopia and other nations
competing for the waters of the Nile, and not north toward the Levant.
The Nile River, the lifeblood of Egypt’s 82 million people (Photo credit: CC BY Simona Scolari, Flickr)
As proof that this pivot has already begun,
Sofer pointed to Abu-Simbel, near the border with Sudan. There the state
has converted a civilian airport into a military one. “The conclusion
to be drawn from this is simple and unequivocal,” he wrote. “Egypt today
represents a military threat to the southern nations of the Nile and
not the Zionist state to the east.”
The Sinai Peninsula, already quite lawless,
will only get worse, perhaps to the point of secession, he and Berkovsky
wrote. Local Bedouin will have difficulty raising animals in the region
and will turn, to an even greater degree, to smuggling material and
people along a route established in the Bronze Age, through Sinai to
Asia and Europe.
Syria, even if the war were swiftly resolved,
is “on the cusp of catastrophe.” Jordan, too, is in dire need of water.
And Gaza, like Syria, has been battered by unchecked drilling. The day
after Israel left under the Oslo Accords, he said, the Palestinian
Authority and other actors began digging 500 wells along the coastal
aquifer even though Israel had warned them of the dangers. “Today there
are around 4,000 of them and no more ground water. It’s over. There’s no
fooling around with this stuff,” he said.
Only the two most stable states in the region – Israel and Turkey – have ample water.
Turkey is the sole Middle Eastern nation
blessed with plentiful water sources. Ankara’s control of the Tigris and
the Euphrates, among other rivers, means that Iraq and Syria, both
downriver, are to a large extent dependent on Turkey for food, water and
electricity. That strategic advantage, along with Turkey’s position as
the bridge between the Middle East and Europe, “further serves its
neo-Ottoman agenda,” Sofer said.
He envisioned an increased role for Turkey
both in the Levant and, eventually, in central Asia and along the oil
crossroads of the Persian Gulf, pitting it against Iran. Climate change,
he conceded, has only a minor role in that future struggle for power
but it is “an accelerant.”
Israel no longer suffers from drought.
Desalination, conservation and sewage treatment have alleviated much of
the natural scarcity. In February, the head of the Israel Water
Authority, Alexander Kushnir, told the Times of Israel
that the country’s water crisis has come to an end. Half of Israel’s
two billion cubic meters of annual water use is generated artificially,
he said, through desalination and sewage purification.
For Sofer, this self-sufficiency is an immense
regional advantage. Israel could pump water east to Jenin in the West
Bank and farther along to Jordan and north to Syria.
International
organizations could follow Israel’s example and fund regional
desalination plants, which, he noted, cost less than a single day of
modern full-scale war.
Instead, rather than an increase in
cooperation, he feared, the region would likely witness ever more
desperate competition. Sofer said his friends see him as a sort of
Jeremiah. But the Middle East, he cautioned, is a region where “leaders
wake up every morning and ask what can I do today to make matters
worse.”
