Unsafe Homecoming: Unraveling Environmental Injustice and Land Dispossession in the Syrian Refugee Crisis

ABSTRACT

This paper attends to the Syrian refugee crisis to argue that land dispossession is not only a political and humanitarian phenomenon, but one that cuts to the core of how we inhabit, experience, and belong on the land. Amid the forced repatriation of Syrian refugees to their country, activists used the hashtag #SyriaNotSafe to raise awareness about the detentions, disappearances, and torture of returnees. Beyond the immediate political persecution of refugees, this paper argues for crafting networked cultures of care attentive to the toxic environmental legacies of the Syrian conflict. Cultures of care must be sensitive to the affective relationships of interdependence between Syrians and their local ecosystems forged during the lifetime of revolutionary struggle. By shedding light on the toxicity of war, the weaponization of the environment, and the deliberate land dispossession by the Assad regime, the ability of Syrians to constitute acts of resistance in sympoiesis or “making with” the land is impacted. If we are to unite in acts of care for refugees, we must resist the inclination to imagine the necropolitical cultures in which we live as somehow distinct from the imperative for environmental justice and the ability to survive and thrive with the land.

KEYWORDS:

• Forced repatriation
• environmental justice
• ecological displacement
• land politics
• decolonial

In blatant disregard of the principle of non-refoulement, in 2019 the Danish government revoked the residency permits of hundreds of Syrian refugees and began detaining those it wanted to deport back to their home country (“Denmark: Don’t send refugees back to Syria”, 2021; “The principle of non-refoulement”, 2018). Though Denmark was once a welcoming host to Syrian refugees, in the run up to her election in 2019, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen underlined her vision for “zero asylum seekers” claiming the country’s “social cohesion” was under threat (“Danish Prime Minister”, 2021). Refugees were placed in isolated “return centers,” where they checked in their possessions, waited in limbo, and were held separate from their communities and forbidden from working or pursuing an education. To rationalize this shift, Frederiksen and her supporters promoted the premise that Damascus was safe, articulating a false equivalency between “safety” and reduced government targeting of civilians, rather than an in-depth understanding of conditions on the ground. Imploring the Danish government to reverse their decision, the hashtag #SyriaNotSafe was used by activists and scholars to call for a reversal of the deportation of refugees. Demonstrations broke out in over 25 cities across Denmark, mobilizing affective publics through drawing attention to the existential threat posed to refugees.

Denmark, of course, is not alone in its backlash against Syrian refugees and in its attempts to forcibly repatriate them (Hickson & Wilder, 2023; Melvyn Ingleby, 2019). Interrupting hegemonic narratives of Syria as safe, globally dispersed activists have emphasized the political nature of refugee identity to contrast the tendency toward a neutral “humanitarian” approach which discounts how refugees are still entangled with the liberation struggle in their “homeland” (Ghazal Aswad, 2019, 2020; Ghazal Aswad & de Velasco, 2020). Although air and ground attacks had decreased, Syria is still a dangerous place, with ongoing reports of torture, forced disappearances, detention, arbitrary arrest and arbitrary executions (“Our lives are like death”, 2021). Syrians who are forcibly repatriated, often by virtue of their having fled Syria in the first place or because they are perceived to be affiliated with the opposition or to have expressed dissent, are subject to interrogation and are at risk of being retaliated against by authorities (“Secretary Antony J. Blinken the UN Security Council”, 2021). A case in point is Mazen Hamada, a refugee and former detainee in the Netherlands who told the world about his brutal torture in Syrian prisons and was arrested almost immediately upon his return to Syria. He has not been heard from since (Sly, 2021).

Refugees are habitually “caged within a depoliticized humanitarian space” (Nyers, 2006), a stance which might keep refugees alive, but is vexingly “incapable of changing the conditions that have put them at such great risk” (Feldman, 2008). Building on this premise, this paper contends that not only do we need to focus on the immediate political persecution of refugees, we must craft networked cultures of care attentive to the environmental legacies of the Syrian conflict and the relationships of the lands and waters. Robert Cox established the field of environmental communication as a “crisis discipline,” accentuating the ethical obligation to intervene to enhance the well-being of both human communities and natural biological systems (Cox, 2007). Expanding this call, Phaedra C. Pezzullo imagines environmental communication as a care discipline “devoted to unearthing human and nonhuman interconnections, interdependence, biodiversity, and system limits … to honor the people, places, and nonhuman species with which we share our world” (Pezzullo, 2017). For Pezzullo, “networked cultures of care” are alert to the communal values and experiences which imagine otherwise futures, and the interdependent relationships required to achieve them (Pezzullo, 2023).

Pulling from these conceptualizations of environmental communication, in this commentary, I attend to the losses, lives, and resistance of Syrian refugees to illustrate why we must not delink the plight of refugees, and the care we ethically might extend to them, from the environmental injustice committed against them and their local ecosystems. Inherently, this rhetoric of care unearths our interdependence and refusal to abide by politics of “settler scale,” i.e. the separation of humans from their environments, lands, and other nonhuman forms (Goeman, 2017; Gordon, 2024).

To elaborate, I will provide a short synopsis on the Syrian Revolution, and the ensuring military conflict, foregrounding the intertwined ecological conditions of possibility of this period of extreme violence. After, I highlight two key considerations for environmental communication scholarship: (1) the toxicity of war and (2) the ontologies of land dispossession. In this discussion, I unpack the environment injustices perpetrated by the Assad regime which led to the migration of Syrians from their lands. I underline how this interfered with relationships of interdependence between Syrians and the nonhuman world. I conclude by reflecting on the moral prerogative to care for refugees amid the polyvalent nature of their dispossession. Overall, I argue that land dispossession is not only a political and humanitarian phenomenon, but one that strikes at the essence of what counts as environmental justice and how we inhabit, experience, and belong on the land.

On the origins of the Syrian revolution

Syria lies in what has historically been called the Fertile Crescent, or “cradle of civilization,” because of the region’s rich soils and abundant access to water. Two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, regularly flooded the region. At one point, Syria’s fields provided about one-third of Syria’s entire wheat production (Hincks, 2021). But by 2006, many rural populations were floundering. After years of declining state support and a severe drought lasting from 2006 to 2010, farmer’s profit margins faded, and thousands quit and moved to crowded urban centers. Water became scarce and food costly (Daoudy, 2020).

The role of the environment in the Syrian revolution has been much contested but is central to examining the conditions of possibilities for land dispossession today. While there is no doubt that climate change is impacting the region, the narrative that climate change is the precipitating cause of the revolution fed early perceptions of Syrian refugees as “environmental migrants” (Daoudy, 2020, p. 8; Selby et al., 2017). This “climate-conflict nexus” narrative insists climate change induced the drought, agricultural failure and poverty, and the resultant discontent which instigated the revolution. Syrian scholar Marwa Daoudy suggests this narrative of “environmental determinism” positions the regime as an inert victim of nature, arguably erasing the moral ideals of activists who protested for the end of political repression. She argues it was the exigencies of totalitarian political ideology, including repression and human rights violations, that were the primary motivators for revolution. Indeed, it was the police torture of school children for anti-regime graffiti in the border town of Daraa, and horror at the images of Hamza Al Khatib’s tortured body, that instigated fervent calls for the fall of the Assad regime. The regime violently cracked down on protestors, hoping to quell the rebellious spirit taking hold of the country, but instead of subduing Syrians into subservience, the peaceful revolution escalated into an armed conflict. Nearly thirteen million Syrians fled their homes in what would become known as the “Syrian refugee crisis,” the largest displacement of humans in recent history (UNHCR, 2023a). While around 6 million are internally displaced inside of Syria, around 5 million left to neighboring Middle Eastern countries and the remaining one million escaped to Europe (Connor, 2018).

Having said this, although the environment was perhaps only a “background factor” in triggering the initial political mobilization (Daoudy, 2023), the Assad’s regime’s role in the ecological crises in the country must not be brushed over. Unsustainable environmental practices included the mismanagement of natural resources, the inadequate response to mining pollution (which damaged the agriculture sector and amplified food insecurity), and a host of other practices which placed severe stress on water and land resources and created a unique set of vulnerabilities for Syrians (Daoudy, 2023). As the revolution unraveled, environmental relations continued to shift, an important dimension to be explored next. The environment would come to play a critical role in the revolution, and eventual refugee crisis, in ways which warrant further attention.

Weaponizing the environment and the toxicity of war

Considering the scale and duration of the Syrian revolution (and the ensuing military conflict), which continues today over a decade since it began, it is incredible that as of yet there have been few studies to understand the environmental toll of the conflict and the foreclosures that obfuscate Indigenous ontologies of land. These intersections have gone unnamed or under-recognized in public discourse, generally eclipsed by alarm at the escalating numbers of dead amid the collective bombing of entire cities. Not only are the environmental effects of war much less visible than a leg blown off or a dead body, mapping environmental degradation based on systematic field measurements is still impossible in many parts of the country. In government-controlled areas, independent civil society groups and international journalists are denied permission to enter in what has been called a “stranglehold” over the country (Cooke, 2016).

The existing evidence indicates that years of prolonged fighting and the high usage of explosive weapons have left a toxic footprint in Syria which present both immediate and long-term threats to those who once lived on the land and to those remaining (“Amidst the Debris”, 2020). Indiscriminate aerial bombardments by the regime caused large oil and wastewater spills. Huge swathes of the country have been reduced to millions of tons of rubble, such that cement dust, heavy metals, industrial chemicals, asbestos, and hazardous substances fill the atmosphere (Rashwani et al., 2023). Unexploded ordnances, such as landmines, still pose a risk of detonation and need at least fifty years to be cleared (Dathan, 2019). The full legacy of the regime’s chemical weapons attacks against civilians is yet unknown (Brooks et al., 2018). As the world dwelled on the health crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, one man accentuated the danger of everyday living: “They asked us to wash our hands and houses, but the streets (were) more dangerous than the virus” (PAX, 2020).

Moreover, makeshift oil refineries have become one of the largest contributors to pollution in Syria (Hincks, 2021). In an attempt to prevent ISIS from gaining access to a revenue source, attacks on professional oil production facilities resulted in tens of thousands of ad-hoc refineries being constructed in their place. These refineries produce a low-quality fuel called “mazut” sold on the black market to power items like stoves, cars, and motorcycles, but which cause significant environmental damage in the process. Civilians and rebels working at the refineries, including orphaned children and poorly paid teenagers, are exposed to highly lethal fumes from manually heating crude. Spillages, dumping, and leaking pipes create rivers of black oil. As a result, the water supply of entire governates has become polluted, most notably in Deir ez Zor, Syria’s oil capital, and Hasakeh (“War, Waste, and Polluted Pastures”, 2021). As Ali, the owner of a well-digging business who later became a refugee in a wheelchair (after being paralyzed by a rocket), water is valorized not only for sustenance, but because it is theophanic: “It is written in the Quran … water is life” (Wendle, 2015).

Beyond this, the Assad regime deliberately used land as a means to quell dissent, namely sieges and burning of the land (Batatu, 1999). For instance, the most popular slogan of regime supporters was “Assad or we burn the country” (Dagher, 2019), a mantra meant both figuratively and literally. Aside from the unintentional igniting of fires and blackening of crops with explosive weapons, the regime engaged in the wanton torching of farmland with incendiary weapons as a tactic to destroy livelihoods and dispossess Syrians of their land (“Farmland on fire in northeast Syria”, 2020). By 2019, over 380,000 acres of wheat and barley fields had been incinerated as part of “kneel or starve” campaigns (Kanfash & al-Jasem, 2019). A women from Tell Nasri, a small town whose cropland was burned, explains how this scorched earth campaign did not just harm the land and decimate Syria’s agriculture, but attempted to severe human connection to land and the coalitional bonds farmers have with the land: “I saw my husband in pain due to the burns, which he got for the love of his land and crops. Farmers tend to treat their land the way they treat their children” (Kanfash & al-Jasem, 2019). These sentiments bring to the fore the mechanisms through which people are dispossessed of their lands, bodies violated and relationships with the land fragmented. The Syrian first responder rescue organization White Helmets claims these tactics intimately impact relations with the animate/ inanimate agents bound up in land: the burning of crops burns “all aspects of life” (“The White Helmets”, 2019).

Ontologies of the land & cultures of care

Fundamentally, the environment impacts the ability to survive and thrive, but more specifically, the ability to constitute resistance in sympoiesis or “making with” the land (Haraway, 2016). The Syrian revolution, as it resisted the carceral logics of a neocolonial authoritarian regime, became enmeshed materially with the land, in what has been termed land-led politics (Ghazal Aswad & Lechuga, in press). This conception of land leadership arose amid geographic (dis)location from/within the land, when people facing land dispossession look to their affective relationships with the land to organize political subjectivities and counterhegemonic ways of conceiving of, being on, and relating to the land.

The embodied resistance of Syrians to the Assad regime reveal a phenomenon akin to what Zapotec scholar-activist Isabel Altamirano-Jimenez describes as “body land,” the ontological relationships which develop between people and territory articulated through decolonial praxis in conjunction with the interconnected systems of the natural world (Altamirano-Jiménez, 2020). These relationships went beyond the defense and armed affirmation of territories to land-based practices meant to undo varying and multiple degrees of disconnection from the land. To safeguard their own land traditions, some smuggled ancient varieties of seeds, as well as wheat and barley seeds, across the border after Syria’s seed bank, once one of the largest in the world, collapsed during the conflict (Mountain, 2015). Other farmers in the outskirts of Aleppo pioneered their own seedbank to save thousands of biodiverse crops (Duggan & Russell, 2020).

Networked cultures of care arose to resist efforts to expel them from the land. For example, a mutual aid organization Syrian Jasmines (previously Beit al Mouneh), made up of women from six Syrian governorates who gathered in the liberated city of Idlib, created environmentally sustainable farms while under siege, as well as organized support teams for woman-headed households in areas where bombing campaigns was taking place. They created food banks and distributed food such as olive oil, pomegranate molasses, eggplant, and tomato paste to refugees who had been internally displaced due to military escalation under the Together We Shall Stay campaign (“The Beit al Mouneh Project in Idlib”, 2020). Another initiative was 15th Garden, a grassroots network named after the day the revolution started which consisted of urban gardens built in besieged areas across Syria. These farms were experiential mechanisms to resist the dispossession of territory and transcend structures of domination, built as they were on garbage lots, construction lots, between buildings, in old food ration tins, and on rooftops (Ciezadlo, 2016). Meanwhile, the Olive Branch campaign arranged bus trips for children to visit the ancestral lands from which they had been displaced in the hope that possibilities for relating to the land in affective and reciprocal ways might still be possible (Branch, 2017).

In contrast to the Assad regime’s necropolitics on the land, these networked cultures of care illustrate relations with the land that are collective, intergenerational, and offer spiritual and material sustenance. Ghiyath Matar, the young revolutionary known for his practice of distributing roses and water to solders coming to repress protestors, exhibits the intimate and embodied ways of resisting with the land and with others. A brother of a friend was coerced by the mukhabarat (the secret police) to make a phone call imploring Ghiyath for help. Ghiyath suspected it was a trap, but he went anyway. A few days later, his body was returned to his family with bullet holes and signs of torture. In a letter to comrades uncovered after his death, he poignantly envisioned a future where nurturing the land and achieving liberation are mutually constitutive: “Remember me when you celebrate the fall of the regime and the liberation of the homeland from those who abuse it. Remember me every time you plant a jasmine sapling in Syrian soil … and remember that I gave my soul and blood for that moment” (Matar, 2020; Sly, 2011).

On the one hand, Syrians enacted practices of resistance embedded in the land, while on the other hand, environmental injustices “paralyzed” some who became reluctant or unable to plant fields or make any investment in or with the land (“We Fear More War”, 2022). Truck driver Jaber Hussein relates how he became disjointed from the land against his will over the lifetime of the conflict. The river in his village of Kharab Abu Ghalib became polluted with oil waste discharge. Waves of torrential rains caused the river to flood, contaminating the nearby land, destroying crops, and making the soil impossible to cultivate. Hussein’s fracture from the land is animated by frustration and anguish, revealing the contradictions and consequences of different ontologies of land over the course of the revolution: “Today, as a young man, I am looking for a better future to live and start a family, but I am struck by the fact that I will not be able to live in the village, even though I own a house in it, for fear that my family will get sick from this pollution … I am forced to look … elsewhere. Today I feel desperate” (PAX, 2020). In many situations, it is this kind of despair which forced so many to look for ways out of the toxic landscape they lived on. With no remediation in site (and the regime’s confiscation and/or appropriation of the lands of many who left) (Hamza, 2021; Nassar, 2021), the forced refoulement of refugees to uninhabitable lands is another layer of human rights harm which forgets the cultural, ecological, resistance, and social networks that are supported by the natural world.

Conclusion

Today, over half of the Syria’s pre-war population is in exile, with 13.5 million either internally displaced or outside the country’s border (UNHCR, 2023b). Many yearn to return home, of returning and living on the land, in their ancestral villages and towns, while for others, home and belonging is fluid, across geographies and temporalities. As we mobilize networked cultures of care, environmental advocacy must be attuned to the vulnerabilities of refugees and the expansiveness of their dispossession by a regime that has perpetuated environmental, cultural, and physical genocide against them. To care for refugees is to care for land relations, livelihood practices, and modes of resistance which move us toward decolonial futures (Ghazal Aswad, 2024). Environmental injustice as dispossession is an orientation critical to assessing not only the political threats and vulnerabilities of refugees forced to return to their countries of origin, but also how we might rejuvenate bonds with the environment, including each other.

There is still much work to be done. The United Nation’s stipulates 22 protection thresholds to be met before mass voluntary returns of refugees can be initiated. Not one mentions the remediation of affected areas or rehabilitation work related to the consequences of war on the soil, air, and land (UNHCR, 2018). In a similar vein, UNHCR, the UN agency mandated to provide protection to refugees, said that until the “security situation” becomes “more stable,” it would not facilitate mass returns. This is perhaps no surprise: The UN's legal definition of a refugee as someone “unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion” does not encompass those fleeing the toxic environmental conditions caused and exacerbated by the criminal acts of those in power (UNHRC, 1951). This myopic focus on traditional security concerns and political persecution, while not misplaced, assumes too little about the environmental legacies generated or exacerbated by the conflict and the networked cultures of care needed to navigate the “refugee crisis” over the long durée. If we are to unite in acts of care for refugees, we must resist the inclination to imagine the necropolitical cultures in which we live as somehow distinct from the imperative for environmental justice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).