A barren desert. Warlords that terrorize the land. Cities abandoned in flames. Water droughts driving millions to famine. Is this the description of a post-apocalyptic wasteland in "Mad Max: Fury Road?" While it certainly is, the image has grown increasingly akin to the situation in Syria.
Arabia, of which Syria is historically considered a part of, has never been a stable region. Countries were never divided by clear borders, but rather tribes of Arab Bedouins mixed with several city-states such as Jerusalem or Damascus. Yet, once the West returned to the region they sprung from, things went arguably downhill.
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Whether it was T.E. Lawrence’s unification of the Arab tribes into the Arab National Council or the two-state solution that has still caused ongoing conflict in Israel since, the region that was the center of civilization is now considered by the modern world as a hot spot of conflict driven by ignorant religious belligerents. The recent developments in Syria have started to look like George Miller’s world coming to life.
The insurrection started in 2011, as part of the Arab Spring, a series of violent uprisings across the Middle East aiming to overthrow oppressive governments. Yet often, the new regimes were worse than the old ones.
In Syria, ISIL, known more famously as ISIS, started seizing towns and villages. As the war worsened, chemical weapons were deployed against UN human rights codes. With the collapsing government, public utilities became a second thought to combating the insurgents. This meant that irrigation in an already dry region completely failed, leaving dead crops and lack of water across the rural mountainous and desert regions. A mass exodus ensued, leaving Lebanon in its own state of crisis with 20 percent of the population being refugees from Syria. Refugees have fled as far as Greece and Italy.
Are droughts the cause of the violence? Not at first, certainly, though recent battles have been over watersheds. The crisis is becoming more primal in demands for resources as the Syrian government loses more and more land and legitimacy to the rebels. Bombs are dropped every day in a country with few resources. Having witnessed a shelling of a small town from the Golan Heights in Israel, it is profoundly affecting to see a deserted town with explosions occurring from a nook up in a mountain, where I had come on vacation from a very peaceful typical suburban middle-class upbringing. It occurred to me that all of the headlines and shared Facebook posts I glimpse over casually each day are actually very real issues. So how can this problem be solved?
Religious extremists cannot exactly be considered rational. ISIL’s mission is to create an Islamic empire like in the days of yore, free of Western influence that has crept into governments over the past few decades. Yet, in the intermingled globalization world we live in, this is not really possible anymore. International trade is near impossible to avoid. It is not as though the Babylonians did not trade with the Far East and Africa. Still, in a war of ideologies, ISIL would rather deplete its constituents of modern technologies if it meant not trading with the West.
On the water issues that plague the region, Strategic Foresight Group has developed a plan titled the Blue Peace approach, with the main ideology being that cooperation between nations for water conservation will lead to further peace between nations. This Blue Peace idea is starting to be implemented between Jordan and Israel, both nations creating sanctions on the Dead Sea and Jordan River drainage. Both the Dead Sea and the Jordan River have been reduced in volume vastly since 1950 due to farmers taking the water for crops as well as natural evaporation.
The Jordan River feeds into the Dead Sea and the irrigation that the water is used for is resulting in reduced flow, leading to the lessening shoreline. The Dead Sea, being the third saltiest body of water on the planet, does not provide fresh water for Israel or Jordan, though it does make for a very profitable phosphorous mining opportunity for both countries as well as a huge tourist attraction.
If continued rates of recession occur, one of Earth’s most unique landmarks will be a salty pit by 2050. So, the Jewish State and Muslim State have worked together to control the recession and are looking into a joint effort known as the Red Sea-Dead Sea pipeline, where a pipeline will feed water from the Red Sea at the Southern tip of Israel where the Jordanian border again meets the Israeli border and take advantage of the Dead Sea valley being the lowest point on Earth to have a natural slope and flow of the water.
The potential for both preservation of the Dead Sea for both nations as well as hydroelectric power to supply both countries is innumerable in benefit. While in the planning stage, this would mark a cooperative effort that will surely lend way to further trade and dialogues. In addition, Jordan is also considered one of the safest countries in the Middle East, with Western tourists, welcome to see the sights such as Petra and Wadi Rum. To put it shortly, Jordan is no Syria.
So is the situation for the millions of displaced refugees hopeless? It is hard to ever see Syria and Iraq cooperating with Israel and the US to improve the situation, as their regimes are so unstable they cannot even help their own people. Yet, the key to a “successful” nation is to cooperate with international trading partners, so as to make the most of the limited resources there are in the arid region. While the Syrian conflict has many factors, the main problem is the lack of water, and as a country, they cannot fix this alone.
Then again, are they really a country with two conflicting and violent regimes ruling the land? In the middle ages, the collective area of what is now Syria, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and Lebanon was referred to as the Holy Land. Not confined by borders, multiple faiths lived in relative peace and traded with one another as part of their daily lives. While that is far from the picture of the region today, it takes a while to erase a century of war and conflict.
In David Lean’s masterpiece "Lawrence of Arabia," Claude Rainns plays Mr. Dryden, the governor of the Arab Bureau representing the British interests in Arabia during World War I. T.E. Lawrence is reflecting upon the difficulty of unifying Bedouin tribes into an institutionalized political institution, to which Mr. Dryden remarks “big things have small beginnings”. Whether these small beginnings are yet to come, or whether they can be the Red Sea-Dead Sea canal, the Middle East has been one of the most fascinating regions in the world since the dawn of civilization. It would be a shame for Syria to continue to be the represent the decline of civilization.
