Dedicated to Faraj Bayrakdar and Simon Nakze

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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 5th 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

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

Images.

Introduction

1

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 Erdoğan, 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

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.

2

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.

The War in Iraq

3

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’état 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

Iraq, with no requirement for foreign companies to reinvest in Iraq to help rebuild and

cut down unemployment.i 4

i Nonetheless the Saddam-era ban on trade unions and collective bargaining was upheld, cf. endnote 4.

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

further disenfranchised Sunnis in government in fear of a Ba’athist coup d’état.

Unemployment, experiences of violence, bombings and the haphazard management of

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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

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.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

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 Niño and La Niña, 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

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

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.

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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

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 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.

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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

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.

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.

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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

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

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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.

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

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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

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

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.

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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

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 Niccolò 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

13

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

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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.