In early 2011, as Syrian security forces were already firing on demonstrators in the southern city of Daraa, and mass demonstrations were taking place nation-wide, former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad addressed his people, reaching for his customary narrative of foreign conspiracy. However, alongside tales of treason and foreign state collusion, Assad announced a set of concessions to the northeastern agricultural region. Notably, Assad passed a law to return citizenship to stateless Kurds in the Hasakah governorate, decades after they were stripped of their nationality in the 1962 census. He cut the price of diesel by 25%, the fuel that pumps groundwater in fields with no river access, and he promised to amend the discriminatory Decree 49 of 2008, which required security approval from Damascus for property transactions in border areas. This decree worked in practice to deprive the Kurdish population of adequate housing, crucially affecting property rights tied to livelihoods and culture including the right to buy, sell, or inherit land.
Assad’s peculiar pairing followed what few people remember: the first large-scale mobilization of the Syrian uprising was in the northeast. On 17 December 2010, Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi had set himself on fire in an act now credited with igniting the so-called Arab Spring. On 28 January 2011, Hasan Ali Akleh drew inspiration from Bouazizi and set himself ablaze in the northeastern Syrian city of Hasakah. Although Akleh’s protest went almost unremarked, small protests and hunger strikes followed in the northeast; demanding reform and a repeal of the state of emergency. On 12 March 2011, thousands marched the streets of Hasakah to commemorate the seventh year anniversary of the Kurdish intifada, Kurdish Martyrs Day, and protest the Assad government; just days before March 18 marked the transformation of the uprising into a nation-wide revolution.
“…he [Bashar al-Assad] said something about how the Kurds would be given citizenship and Law 49 would be abolished…Because everyone in Syria expected it to be the Kurds and this region that would rise up. So they [Kurds] were the first thing they [the government] moved to address, ‘let’s resolve the Kurdish issue so we can reach a kind of settlement with them’…” — Hoshang, a Kurdish farmer from Hasakah.
Assad’s response to protests hence touched on what a decade of contentious climate-conflict debate has missed. In Syria, the ethnic question and the agricultural question are inextricable, and together indispensable to the stability of the northeast, if not Syria at large.
“For us here in the northeast, and for the Kurdish population in particular, we’ve generally opposed the regime, whether under Hafez al-Assad or Bashar al-Assad. After 2004, the position hardened considerably against the regime…even before protests broke out elsewhere, there were attempts here in the north and other areas, the youth were determined to move and go out [to protest], but the regime avoided letting things escalate into a large-scale confrontation here. I remember we did go out, a fairly large group of us protested, but we didn’t push it further to the point of provoking a violent explosion, because there had already been harassment from the regime, and the sense was that if this really erupted, we as Kurds would be facing it essentially alone” — Iman, a farmer from the northeast
However, as Khalaf, a member of a civil society organization in the northeast, put it, the citizenship decree “didn’t solve the underlying problem.” The 2011 concessions were “more symbolic decisions, not effective ones…At the start [of the uprising], the slogan was ‘dignity for all people, dignity, a decent living.’…We arrive at the Jazira region, it’s rich in resources, but it was actually one of the poorest regions…”
The Missing Question
The world learned about Syria’s drought from Obama’s 2015 speeches and Thomas Friedman’s columns; the story of parched fields pushing farmers into cities, breeding an angry youth bulge that exploded in 2011. Over the last 11 years, there has been a surge in climate-conflict literature citing the 2011 uprising in Syria as the most extreme case of what ecological stress, particularly drought, can fuel. The rebuttals cite water mismanagement, subsidy cuts, and neoliberal reform under Assad the son, alongside climate change. However, no one asked who the farmers were.
Many of the farmers were Kurds, particularly in the far northeast, where Kurds form the majority around Malikiyah (Derik). The northeast, the Jazira, that is everything between the Euphrates river and the Turkish and Iraqi borders, has been Syria’s granary and cotton belt since the mid-twentieth century. It is Syria’s richest agricultural zone, its breadbasket, with agriculture long the country’s second export earner after oil that had constituted about 30% of Syria’s GDP before 2011. It is also home to the densest concentration of Syria’s Kurds, the country’s largest ethnic minority at roughly 10% of the population, more than a million of which live in the northeast, though number is deflated as many were never allowed onto the states’ registers. The Jazira also sits on Syria’s richest oil reserves, making it geo-politically and economically invaluable, and prompting successive governments to police it anxiously. However, the Jazira’s drying trend has been recorded since 1931. To understand why drought, particularly the big drought of 2007 landed the way it did—ethnically uneven—one ought to begin with how the Jazira became farmland at all.
A Breadbasket Built on a Border
Until the mid-1920s the Jazira was a thinly settled pasture, and cultivation and permanent settlement remained highly restricted. The main settled agricultural areas lay in a narrow belt along what became the Turkish frontier, from east of Ras al-‘Ayn toward the Tigris, where Kurdish tribes predominated, and around Jabal Sinjar and along the Khabur and Jagh Jagh valleys. These last areas were ethnically mixed. Jabal Sinjar was predominantly Yazidi, while the river valleys were held largely by semi-sedentary Arab groups alongside Kurdish, Circassian, Chechen, Armenian and other communities. French officials described it as an empty “dusting” of nomads. On that premise, the French mandate set out to open the frontier to cultivation by settling Christians and Kurds from Turkey as the region’s future peasants per its own conception.
The final demarcation of the frontier was shaped not only by geographical considerations but also by demographic bargaining and the security consequences of the Kurdish revolts in Turkey. After the suppression of the Sheikh Said rebellion in 1925, significant numbers of Kurdish refugees crossed into French-mandate Syria. Under sustained Turkish pressure, France consequently agreed in principle to keep insurgents, and more broadly Kurdish and Armenian settlement, away from a roughly 50 km frontier zone, although these restrictions were inconsistently enforced. This was particularly significant because the northern frontier belt included some of Upper Jazira’s most favourable rain-fed agricultural land. In the negotiations culminating in the protocol of 22 June 1929, Ankara sought the incorporation of villages, including some in the Heverkan area, that it regarded as refugees or bases for insurgents; France accepted some southward adjustments of the frontier while obtaining most of the disputed Duck’s Beak and access to the Tigris.
Clashes over access to water and grazing became more frequent after the imposition of the Turkish-Syrian frontier and refugees flowed in. French officers and agronomists responded with schemes to regulate these conflicts and to expand cultivation, promoting irrigated wheat and, increasingly, cotton. The major transformation of Jazira agriculture, however, occurred from the eve of the Second World War through the 1950s. Wartime demand stimulated mechanized cereal cultivation, while capital from Aleppo and other Syrian cities financed tractors, irrigation pumps and the expansion of large commercial farms. Christian entrepreneurs such as the Asfar-Najjar group participated prominently in this process alongside Arab tribal landowners and Kurdish proprietors. During the 1940s and early 1950s agriculture became Syria’s fastest-growing sector; by the 1950s, the Jazira and Euphrates were undergoing a major cereal and cotton boom. At the national level, the rapid expansion of cultivated land had largely exhausted the land that could easily be brought under cultivation.
Frontier land was also tightly regulated, with a legal lineage running back to the Mandate, which restricted foreign acquisition of property in sensitive border areas from 1934. Legislative Decree No. 193 of 1952 applied a comprehensive regime for property and agricultural activity in border zones. As first issued, it was not limited to foreigners. The decree required authorization for property transactions from the Head of State, on the Minister of Justice’s proposal and with the approval of the Ministry of National Defense. Later amendments gave the Ministry of Interior the central role. This was the law later weaponized against the Kurdish population and is the ancestor of Decree 49 of 2008.
With the advent of Syria’s Union with Egypt (1958-1961), the Nasserist state imposed land-holding ceilings aimed at promoting social justice that allowed the state to confiscate excess land. Although it remains unclear that Kurds were intentionally targeted, the policies nevertheless affected Kurdish landowners disproportionally. In Hasakah the confiscation was exceptional in scale; 655,526 hectares were expropriated, 43.3% of the national total. Most of it was non-irrigated or uncultivated land, and only 13% of the governorate had been registered, which slowed distribution. By 1970, 1,513,000 hectares had been expropriated nation-wide, yet 306,000 hectares of land seized in the Jazira was never re-distributed. Nevertheless, a substantial share stayed in state hands with 140,000 hectares reserved for the state farms including a state-farm complex of some 36,000 hectares around Qamishli. By the early 60s, the state more explicitly labelled Kurds “refugees” and used that label to justify confiscating their land.
The ‘Double Fragility’ of the Kurdish Farmer
A pivotal moment arrived on 5 October 1962. Legislative Decree No. 93 of 1962, signed by President Nazim al-Qudsi during the post-union separation period, ordered a general census in the Hasakah to be carried out in a single day. By the time it took place, Khalid al-Azm had replaced Bashir al-Azma as prime minister. The Ba’th would not seize power until March 1963, and they kept the census results. Residents had to establish that they or their families had lived in Syria since at least 1945, and received inadequate warning and little chance to assemble documents. The decree’s restriction to Hasakah, and its overwhelmingly Kurdish impact, alludes to a broader Arab-nationalist demographic policy toward the northeastern frontier. Roughly 120,000 Kurds, about a fifth of Syria’s Kurdish population, were stripped of citizenship overnight, sorted into either ajanib, “foreigners”, barred from owning property, voting or holding public jobs, or maktoumeen, “concealed”, unregistered and legally invisible. Both statuses became inherited and ballooned, leaving a disputed figure of more than 300,000 ajanib in Hasakah by 2011.
The underpinning rationale, or impressions of it, was that land reform would allow Kurds to acquire the Jazira’s best land, so the state pre-emptively removed their legal capacity to own any. Denationalisation meant that land that could be seized, farmed by the state, or handed to others, namely, Arabs, as much of it later was.
“Drought itself, as a geographic phenomenon, doesn’t specifically target Kurds. But Kurds always had grievances about the policies pursued against them, a lack of recognition and outright discrimination tied to things like the creation of the Arab Belt, the confiscation of agricultural land, the seizure of that land, being denied citizenship, and having limited participation in governance or official positions, even within their own region. Drought was an additional layer on top, and it was these very policies that meant the pressure fell harder here.” — Khalaf
Even when state policies did not target Kurds explicitly or were nominally neutral, they compounded the same disadvantage, producing a double fragility for the Kurdish farmer. The first layer of fragility being the exposure of every farmer’s livelihood to declining and increasingly sporadic rainfall, water mismanagement, and neoliberal policies that made the trade less sustainable. The second is legal, and fell squarely on the Kurdish farmer. When farming yields fell, a stateless farmer could not lawfully switch to another trade or register a business, a vehicle, nor property. Many stayed on as sharecroppers cultivating land their families had once owned, while paying a harvest share to the new landlord. In addition, overtly ethnically discriminatory policies would become formal state policy in the early 1970s.
The Arab Belt
Roughly three-quarters of Syria’s cultivated land is rain-fed. The north-most areas receive between 300 and 500mm of rain per year, while southward the totals fall away fast into steppe. By 1965 the government had a plan for frontier control and demographic restructuring. The construction of the Euphrates dam (1968-73) and the filling of Lake Assad displaced more than 60,000 inhabitants of the Euphrates valley, and in the mid-1970s about 4,000 Arab families were resettled in model villages in northern al-Hasakah, largely on land earlier expropriated under agrarian reform, much of it from Kurdish owners. These roughly 41 to 42 villages formed a chain within a planned border corridor, some 280 to 375 kilometres long and 10 to 15 kilometres deep, that overlapped with some of the Jazira’s more reliable rain-fed land. The state also replaced Kurdish village names with Arabic ones, and slashed landholding ceilings along land that received the most rain, such as “line 10”, seizing the excess as state property.
“Every Kurdish village then had next to it a mag’moureen village [resettled Arabs], which was Kurdish land the state gave them…The regime wouldn’t give them [Kurds] electricity, wouldn’t extend sewage lines, forcing them to evacuate the areas.” — a representative of Green Nes, a climate-focused initiative based in northeastern Syria
Public irrigation followed a similar geography. The state’s largest functioning surface-water schemes lay along the Euphrates and the central and lower Khabur. Some canal infrastructure did extend north and northeast of Hasakah, but public coverage stayed far thinner across the Kurdish-majority northern frontier plain. A very large scheme to pump Tigris water from Ayn Diwar across northeastern Hasakah was eventually planned, but never became operational
“There was a canal irrigation project, a plan to bring a channel from the river through the land to serve development in the countryside. Originally the route was meant to pass through land that had a Kurdish population; later, the plan was changed and rerouted to go directly toward Arab-majority areas instead.” — Iman
An Arab farmer on canal-irrigated land paid little to water his crop, while a Kurdish farmer growing the same crop for the same market pumped from hundreds of metres underground.
“People started relying on pumps to extract groundwater after every rainfall. People would take their pumps and pay a lot to extract water to their fields. As the water table kept dropping, they had to keep pumping, which became very expensive.” — a representative of Green Nes
By the 1990s the state was pushing farmers toward groundwater and cash crops, particularly cotton, licensing deeper wells and subsidising the diesel to pump them. The number of wells across Syria climbed from 53,000 in 1988 to 124,000 in 1994 and kept climbing to 2007; nearly half were in Hasakah province. This was due to harsher drought periods, coupled with Turkey’s building of the Atatürk dam upstream the Euphrates.
The Euphrates, still the backbone of Syria’s agriculture, continues to supply the great majority of Syria’s surface water, and Turkey controls the flow. Damascus spent the 1980s and 90s supporting Abdullah Öcalan’s Kurdish led PKK party that Turkey considered a terrorist organization, and hosted Öcalan in Syria partly as a bargaining chip for water releases. However, there remains a scarcity in formal agreements on water sharing. In 1987, Syria, Iraq, and Turkey agreed that Turkey would allow a minimum flow of 500 cubic metres per second to Syria, with Syria and Iraq then sharing this flow, but this agreement, to date, is largely ignored.
Reaching the Boiling Point
On 12 March 2004, Iraq’s interim constitution recognised Kurdish self-rule following Saddam Hussein’s fall, a football match in Qamishli between Kurdish and Arab crowds tipped into clashes. Security forces opened fire, killing at least 36, most of them Kurds. The unrest that followed, termed the Kurdish intifada, along with subsequent security harassment constituted one of the freshest grievances for northeastern Kurdish communities at the onset of the 2011 uprising, followed by the memory of land seizures.
“I felt he [Assad] sensed that things were reaching a boiling point in the north. It [Assad’s concession in 2011] felt like a signal that he understood something serious was coming and wasn’t ready to confront us directly, because the 2004 experience had been very harsh…In terms of what’s stayed most present in farmers’ minds, it’s the land seizures that’s really the biggest, most enduring issue, because it wasn’t only about agricultural or ownership rights in an abstract sense, it was about actual use and access, and that stayed lodged in farmers’ consciousness…A second point is access to services. Things like drilling permits for wells, or similar administrative matters. Access to those has historically favored the Arab component of the population. Transactions moved faster, and were processed more easily for Arab residents. There was a lot of corruption running through all of this, but even within that corruption, a Kurdish applicant would typically have to pay a larger bribe to get the same thing done…” — Iman
The Drought of 2007
Between 2007 and 2009 Syria experienced the worst drought in its recorded history. Qamishli received a quarter of its 1961–90 average rainfall while Deir ez-Zor received 12%. Nationally, some 800,000 farmers and herders lost their livelihoods. By mid-2009 the Ministry of Agriculture estimated that between 40 and 60 thousand families left drought-affected areas. This was the largest wave of Kurdish out-migration from the Jazira, with migrants citing both the drought and post-2004 security harassment.
The 2007 drought hence landed on people who had been cornered in advance. It was not uncommon for a small farmer’s debt to be worth more than their land, and pleas for interest forgiveness during the drought were never met with a meaningful response. Access to rescheduling, inputs and crop payments ran through the Agricultural Bank where bribery and connections decided outcomes.
“When the interest becomes compound it becomes a crushing burden…The restructuring itself became a windfall for the people in the Agricultural Cooperative Bank, who manipulated the accounts…There was no one, no one, under ten million in debt…What helped during the crisis period was that these debts stayed denominated in Syrian pounds and the dollar’s value returned. Crops were being bought in the Autonomous Administration period in dollars. So this factor helped farmers zero out or clear their obligations toward the Agricultural Bank. Or otherwise, if Assad’s thugs were still around today, for all the Kurdish areas, the government could under the pretext of existing debts simply file lawsuits and take these lands from their owners…” — Hoshang
Since 2005, the state had also cut fuel and food subsidies to balance the budget, hitting farmers dependent on pumped water the most with a seven-fold increase in diesel prices; some even argue the subsidy shock hit harder than the drought itself. In 2008 the state further cut subsidies increasing diesel prices by 257% overnight. Then came Decree 49 of 2008, requiring security approval from Damascus for any property transfer in border areas, approval that Arabs received and Kurds, overwhelmingly, did not.
However, through all of this, the anger both agrarian and ethnic pointed at the state, not at neighbouring Arab farmers. The pronounced ethnic tension of later years is notably a wartime product; even now, when farmers recall the pre-2011 northeast, the fear they describe stems from what came after.
“I see that the former Syrian government was the main reason [for the crisis in the northeast]. Before 2011 it was a period of crisis and a period of migration, and it was done intentionally that nobody supported the farmers so people would migrate out of the Kurdish areas and evacuate the area”. — Green Nes
It was not drought alone that emptied the villages, nor mismanagement, but decades of accumulated grievance in which agriculture and ethnicity were never separable. Although his concession failed, when Assad reached for citizenship decrees and diesel prices in 2011, he was reading the same history, addressing societal pressure points his government had actively been aggravating.
Water in Wartime
The war made water a weapon and infrastructure a hostage, and Euphrates dams changed hands as strategic prizes. The Alouk station that supplied water to nearly a million people in the Hasakah province and surrounding areas, was shut down about 36 times during the war period through a combination of military damage, deliberate shutdowns, access restrictions and reciprocal electricity-water bargaining. Each interruption deepened fear along ethnic lines. The war also produced Kurdish migration toward the northeast, as Kurds fled ethnic based killings in the cities, although many only transited through the northeast on their way out of Syria. Iman notes, “Conditions here weren’t attractive enough to bring people back. Prices had risen, the situation hadn’t improved enough, so a lot of people who might have returned instead went directly to Iraqi Kurdistan or on to Europe. So there’s been a real generational and demographic thinning in the region as a result.” This led to a critical shortage of people on the farmland.
Green Nes added that “the demographic that stayed [in the northeast] and is farming is mostly those 50 years old and above. The Autonomous Administration also unfortunately did not support the issue of farming, like the [Assad] regime, it thought of its own interests, it bought wheat and seeds at prices that did not help the farmer. Currently there are protests in the streets against the law that came out on the primacy of wheat. The farmer is experiencing multiple years of drought and then one season where he can partially make up losses. The rationale becomes that farming is unpredictable and unprofitable. People started to sell their lands to become repurposed. This will hurt Syria over the long term because there will not be enough agricultural areas.”
The most agriculturally destructive periods however, were periods of instability and transition, when control over land was contested with an absence of stable governance to regulate farming. The early chaos, the ISIS advance, the rise of the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration, and the most recent absorption process of the Autonomous Administration into the new state under President al-Sharaa.
“The past years were also disastrous for Syria overall and the northeast particularly. The absence of oversight, the absence of authorities or the presence of multiple authorities that gave way for each party to evade responsibility. For instance…the water sources in northeast Syria were being used to pressure the Autonomous Administration, and in the end the biggest damage was suffered by the locals…And now the chaos has increased in the transitional period. Over fifteen years, we didn’t find anyone willing to address the root of the problem.” — Green Nes
While fighting damaged soil, wells and power lines, governance vacuums damaged the rules, with groundwater particularly paying the price. About 60% of groundwater reserves in northeastern Syria have been depleted, and around half the traditional wells in rural Hasakah and Aleppo have dried. This was exacerbated by three drought cycles between 2006 and 2021, and then the 2024–25 drought, with the lowest recorded rainfall in 60 years. Additionally, with cheap solar panels now powering unauthorised wells, extraction has never been easier or less policed.
“The vast majority of people in northeast Syria depend on rain water. They grew rain-fed crops. When the rain didn’t come, and in recent years the level of groundwater plummeted. This crisis began with the uprising, people got the chance to evade responsibility. Because there was a revolution against the government, they also raged a revolution against the land. They [farmers] started drilling wells reaching up to 500m, along with an increase in corruption that allowed farmers to be able to do what they wished without authorisation or scrutiny from any authority, and drilling wells became chaotic. We also have the problem of where people had farms and each farm would drill a well or two through bribery, political connections etc. After the regime fell and with the start of the assimilation of the Autonomous Administration with the interim government there was no law left. People started drilling wells every few meters…because there is an opportunity to do so without needing authorization; before government authorities move in, place laws, and require permits. This all affects and to a large extent the groundwater in the area. The groundwater in this year increased, yes, but the number of wells is going to cause a catastrophe in the area.” — Green Nes
The Fear of Going Back
Agriculture now only constitutes about 12% of GDP, yet still supports 6.7 million Syrians. Wheat, once an almost five-million-tonne crop with an export surplus before 2007, collapsed to about 1 million tonnes by 2025 unable to meet local needs. Diesel pumps remain a choke point. When fuel prices were equalised overnight with the rest of Syria, the northeast got a water and electricity crisis, and protests again filled the streets. Although in early 2026 better rains lifted planting to 86% of target per official forecasts, it came in shorter and harsher falls. May of 2026 then saw floods that affected about 85% of farmers’ income and left 85% of irrigation systems out of service.
“This flood hit suddenly, and the necessary measures to protect people still weren’t taken…At the same time there were floods happening in this region, there were also fires in Hasakah. This region is constantly exposed to disasters, fires and floods, and there’s no readiness, no adaptation projects for climate change, no compensation. Neither the [Autonomous] Administration nor the government ever compensated farmers for the drought…and there were several local groups we reached out to who told us people don’t trust us, they say ‘you come, take your reports and leave, you take dollars on our account and we never see you again,’ that’s how deep the mistrust runs, both toward NGOs and toward the government, because there’s an absence of trust between communities.” — Khalaf
Syria’s new interim authorities have recognized the ethnic half of the ledger through Presidential Decree No. 13 to return citizenship to the stateless, alongside symbolic gestures of recognizing Nowruz, the Kurdish new year, as a national holiday, and unbanning the teaching of the Kurdish language in schools. However, nothing comparable has arrived for the agricultural half; but rather a wheat-price and payment problem. By early October, farmers who had delivered during the summer were still waiting to be paid, some for 3 months. When northeastern farmers speak about what they fear most, they name reversion to the status quo including resource mismanagement, neglect, corruption, and agricultural policy that is ethnically discriminatory, more often than they name drought or climate.
“Bashar al-Assad tried to restore citizenship to Kurds as a concession for some issues, for instance, the Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa is trying to appease the people and the Autonomous Administration by giving nationality. This had an effect, but after time was lost. After many migrated and many sold their land. These decisions don’t have immediate effect, because the issues they try to address have had a cumulative effect.”— Green Nes
The lesson of a century in the Jazira is therefore, that anyone who wants stability in the northeast, or in Syria overall, will have to answer both the ethnic and ecological questions at once, because the farmers were never given the luxury of separating them.
