When Water Becomes a Weapon and a Wound: Syria's Water Crisis at the intersection of War, Governance, Gender, and Climate [English]

Written By Thalia Kattoura

اسمي داليه عبد الرحمن، من دير الزور مهندسة زراعية وباحثة في قضايا المياه والتغير المناخي في سوريا، ماجستير في تغير المناخ وأثره على الموارد المائية، وعضوة في فريق السياسات ضمن «كلايمت سايرنز». لماذا كتبتُ هذا المقال؟ لم تكن أزمة المياه في سوريا يوماً بالنسبة لي مجرد موضوعٍ نظري للدراسة بل هي واقعٌ حيّ وتجربة عشتُ تفاصيلها عن قرب. أردتُ من خلال هذا المقال أن أُسلط الضوء على الأبعاد الخفية لهذه الأزمة، وكيف تتشابك خيوطها المعقدة بين الحرب، الحوكمة، ومفهوم الجندر

My name is Lin Mustafaalhasan and I am finishing my degree in electrical and electronics engineering. Alongside my studies, I currently volunteer with Climate Sirens as a web developer, policy researcher, and part of the communications team, and I've also volunteered in peacebuilding, education, and women's rights spaces. Feminism, particularly what it means and demands in the SWANA region, is something I care about deeply, and it shapes how I see almost everything else I work on. I've always loved research across multiple fields, it's what ties everything together for me. Syria's water crisis worsened by climate change falls hardest on women and it sits right at the intersection of everything I care about, systems, policy, and women's rights in SWANA. That's why I wanted to research this topic and highlight the role women play in it.

Water Bearer II - part of “Carry Over”

By Sama Alshaibi

The easiest way to misunderstand Syria's water crisis is to call it a drought story. Droughts have endings. This doesn't.

Syria's water system has failed in every direction. Wells become contaminated, taps run dry, drainage backs up, irrigation lines crack, and the rivers flood the same villages every winter because no one clears the channels. Over fourteen years, the Assad government either bombed that infrastructure directly or allowed it to be destroyed. In January 2025, the ICRC president reported that rehabilitation efforts had restored water provision to 40 to 50 percent of pre-war levels (Alkousaa, 2025). The World Bank estimates the cost of physical reconstruction at $216 billion, within a range of $140 billion to $345 billion, with around $82 billion allocated to infrastructure alone (World Bank, 2025). In a village, 40 percent means a tap that runs for only two hours in the morning, a field left unplanted, and a family that pays a tanker driver for what the pipe used to deliver. For a village, 40 percent means a tap that runs for only two hours in the morning, a field left unplanted, and a family paying a tanker driver for water the pipe used to deliver.

The Silent Killer that Came First

The collapse did not begin with the war. By the time the first protest signs appeared in 2011, Syria had already endured a severe multi-year drought, beginning around 2006/07 and lasting through 2010, with effects unfolded quietly across rural communities (Femia & Werrell, 2012; Kelley et al., 2015). Reports indicated the impact on the northeast in stark terms: harvests failed, herders lost around 85 percent of their livestock, and as many as 1.5 million people moved from rural areas toward cities (Femia & Werrell, 2012). Those estimates remain disputed, however, with later research indicating that much pre-war mobility was temporary or circular, and that rural decline and mobility pressures predated the drought (von der Kammer et al., 2025). The northeast – particularly Hasakah and surrounding rainfed agricultural areas – was among the regions most severely affected. Small farmers watched rainfed land fail season after season. Wheat production, which had averaged 4.1 million metric tons annually between 2002 and 2011, fell to 1.05 million tons by 2021 – roughly one-quarter of the pre-crisis average and its lowest level in decades (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations [FAO], 2021). Agriculture losses between 2011 and 2016 reached an estimated $16 billion, including $3.2 billion in damage to irrigation systems and other agricultural infrastructure (FAO, 2017).

It would be easy to describe what followed as drought-driven migration, but that explanation does not tell the whole story. The rain failed. Policy decided who could survive the failure. The vulnerability of rural communities was shaped by unequal access to irrigation, groundwater, subsidies, and state support. Recent research also finds that rural decline and mobility pressures predated the drought and cannot be explained by rainfall alone (Gleick, 2014; von der Kammer et al., 2025). Groundwater had already been depleted by water-intensive cotton, wheat production, and inefficient irrigation. In 2008 and 2009, cuts to fuel and fertilizer subsidies sharply raised production costs, particularly for farmers dependent on diesel-powered irrigation (Gleick, 2014). The people who moved to the outskirts of Damascus, Aleppo, and other cities were not climate refugees in any simple sense. Their displacement reflected a deeper failure of governance .

The drought was real, but it did not, on its own, decide which farmers kept their land. The government did. Officials in Damascus controlled irrigation allocations, seed and fuel subsidies, and access to diesel. When they withdrew that support, they withdrew it from entire regions at once. Analyses of the pre-war period show that water-management decisions interacted with drought, groundwater depletion, and climatic trends to worsen Syria’s water conditions (Gleick, 2014). Reducing the crisis to climate change is not only incomplete; it also obscures the responsibility of those who made the governing decisions that left so many people exposed.

What the War Did to Water

Syria’s already devastated infrastructure is now being placed under even greater strain by climate change. In 2025, Syria endured its worst drought in 36 years. Reuters reported that the drought reduced expected wheat production by about 40 percent. FAO estimated a wheat shortfall of 2.73 million metric tons, while only 40 percent of the country's farmland was cultivated (El Safty & El Dahan, 2025). In Damascus, the winter of 2025 was the driest since 1956. The Ein al-Fijeh spring and the Barada system normally supply around 70 percent of the water used by approximately five million people in Damascus and its suburbs. As flows declined sharply, many neighborhoods faced severe rationing and greater dependence on tanker water (Alsayed & Sanadiki, 2025). The cracks in Syria's infrastructure are older than the drought. The drought is just widening them.

Rain particularly exposes these failures. In a functioning system, heavy rain is largely beneficial: reservoirs refill, groundwater recharges, and farmers get a season. In a damaged system, however, high river flows and dam releases can overwhelm low-lying settlements and weakened local infrastructure. In late May 2026, rising Euphrates waters caused flooding in Raqqa and Deir al-Zor. Higher-than-usual rainfall prompted authorities to open gates at the Euphrates Dam to reduce pressure, with warnings that river levels could rise by approximately two metres. Agricultural fields, homes, and businesses were damaged, and residents along vulnerable riverbanks were urged to move inland (Al Abdo, 2026). When water arrives too fast and in the wrong place, it is no longer a resource. What appears to be a weather event can become an infrastructure and settlement-planning failure, with rainfall as the trigger.

The political history behind this should not be softened. During the Wadi Barada fighting in late 2016 and early 2017, the Ain al-Fijeh water facility serving Damascus was bombed. The UN Commission of Inquiry found that the Syrian Air Force had purposefully targeted the spring, constituting the war crime of attacking an object indispensable to civilian survival (Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, 2017). Around 5.5 million people were cut off from running water for more than three weeks (Saker, 2017). That finding is not background. It is the context for every later event filed under natural disaster. Syria's water crisis did not emerge from geography or bad luck. It was sharpened by choices: what to strike, what not to rebuild, and what to leave decaying until the next drought or rainfall made the damage visible again.

Who Carries the Water

Women carry this crisis in ways that the available data still do not fully capture. Available national reporting remains insufficiently disaggregated to show the full gendered health and protection effects of Syria’s water crisis. That gap in the data is worth noting, because it is not neutral. It reflects what institutions decide to count, and what they are willing to leave invisible.

The burden falls disproportionately on women and girls. Globally, they spend an estimated 250 million hours every day collecting water, with consequences for education, livelihoods, health, and safety (UNESCO, 2026). In Syria, that burden lands inside mass displacement, poverty, destroyed services, and households where men may be dead, missing, detained, or absent. It means spending more time near unsafe water. More responsibility for moving children when floods begin. Greater exposure to contaminated supplies when sewage and drainage systems fail. Less time for paid work, education, rest, or recovery. Nothing about this is biological. When water systems collapse, households often send women and girls to fetch what is left.

The health consequences are documented, though incompletely. UNICEF reports that conflict-related damage and disruption have affected safe and regular access to safe water and other WASH services for about 14.6 million people; its Syria program specifically identifies menstrual hygiene management as part of the response (UNICEF, n.d.). Inadequate water, sanitation, privacy, and menstrual-health supplies can increase health and protection risks for women and girls, particularly in displacement settings. Syria-specific national data remain too limited to quantify the full burden. Across rural areas, water scarcity, damaged irrigation, and high input costs can force households to reconsider whether farming remains viable. Those decisions are not caused by drought alone; they reflect the combined loss of infrastructure, services, and affordable production inputs (FAO, 2017; Gleick, 2014).

The war broke the pumps, the pipes, and the ministries. Women fetched the water, stretched the food, and nursed the sick, as they had already been doing before the war made everything harder.

Accountability and its Absence

Responsibility runs in several directions, which is one reason accountability has moved so slowly. The Assad government bears the most direct responsibility: for repression, for agricultural policies that depleted groundwater before the war, and for deliberate destruction during it – the Ain al-Fijeh attack being the best-documented case. Western restrictions have also affected recovery. The ICRC president told Reuters that sanctions-related restrictions on spare parts were hampering rehabilitation (Alkousaa, 2025). These are not identical actions, and they should not be treated as such. Yet they meet in the same place: systems fail, repairs stall, and civilians absorb the cost.

This is why Syria’s water crisis belongs in the language of justice, not only disaster response. Under the laws of war, attacks on infrastructure indispensable to civilian survival can amount to war crimes. The Commission of Inquiry’s finding on Ain al-Fijeh established that principle in the Syrian context (Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, 2017). The destruction of systems that kept people alive should be investigated, not softened into the language of collateral damage. European courts have already demonstrated, through universal-jurisdiction prosecutions of former Syrian officials for atrocity crimes, that accountability does not require a functioning domestic justice system (European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights [ECCHR], 2022). This paper argues that comparable investigative approaches should be considered where infrastructure attacks may constitute international crimes. Such investigations should follow the evidence wherever it leads, regardless of who carried out the attack or who holds power now.

Climate Justice Is Not a Metaphor

In Syria, climate justice is not a slogan. It is a pump that runs through August, a drainage channel cleared before the winter rains, an irrigation line that lets a family stay on its land. It is also a ministry with the staff and electricity to keep all of that running after the international response packs up. Syrian farmers did not produce the emissions warming the Fertile Crescent. They are paying for them anyway, through infrastructure that the regime and the war already hollowed out.

The global response does not match the scale of that burden. The Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage, established at COP27 and operationalized at COP28, had received pledges of approximately $822 million by March 2026 (Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage [FRLD], 2026). Independent estimates suggest that developing countries could require as much as $400 billion annually for loss and damage by 2030 (Pill & Hammersley, 2024). The pledged amount is equivalent to roughly 0.2 percent of a single year at the upper-end estimate. The gap is the point. High-emitting states continue negotiating their share of the bill while Syrian farmers lose wheat to drought and topsoil to floods, and while public institutions struggle to maintain the systems that might have reduced those losses.

Syria has a strong claim to climate-justice financing for adaptation and loss and damage. It accounted for about 0.1 percent of global CO₂ emissions from fuel combustion in 2023 (International Energy Agency [IEA], n.d.), and is paying for a crisis produced overwhelmingly elsewhere. The Euphrates floods of May 2026 (Al Abdo, 2026), the 2025 drought (El Safty & El Dahan, 2025), and the steady loss of groundwater are compounding one another, all while straining infrastructure the war had already been broken.

Money will not undo the war, but it can rebuild what determines whether the next drought or flood ruins another harvest. In May 2025, Syria cleared its arrears and regained eligibility for new World Bank operations, subject to applicable operational policies (World Bank, 2025a). That eligibility creates an opportunity for future financing; it does not, by itself, guarantee investment in pumps, drainage, electricity, or the institutions needed to keep those running. Future financing should reach the people who have lost the most and received the least: smallholders, displaced women, and informal settlements along the Euphrates and Orontes. Adaptation finance, loss-and-damage support, and reconstruction funding cannot keep moving on separate tracks when they are paying for the same pump in the same village. Climate justice for Syria means building systems that work between emergencies, not only trucking in water during them.

Conclusion

In Syria today, poor water management is not only a matter of thirst. It is a matter of who pays when the water returns badly, and who pays when it fails to return at all. The May 2026 floods damaged homes, businesses, and farmland along the Euphrates and prompted evacuations, exposing the vulnerability of low-lying riverbank settlements and weakened infrastructure (Al Abdo, 2026). The 2025 drought, the worst in 36 years, landed on irrigation systems already damaged by war and an agricultural sector struggling with high costs and limited capacity to respond (El Safty & El Dahan, 2025; FAO, 2017).

Women absorb what those failed systems leave behind. When the pump stops, they walk for the water. When the harvest fails, they stretch what is left on the shelf. When the sanitation system fails, they manage the consequences: disease risk, menstrual care, and maternal needs that water and privacy would have made bearable. When the family decides whether to stay on the land or leave it, they carry the weight of that decision and the labor that follows it. This article has counted the wheat, the rainfall, and the financing. It has not been able to quantify the hours women in rural Idlib, Hama, and the Jazira spend keeping households alive inside the gap, because the sources reviewed did not identify comparable Syria-specific time-use data.

Climate change is further widening that gap. Syria produced only a very small share of the emissions warming the Fertile Crescent (IEA, n.d.). Yet drought, floods, and groundwater decline are arriving on infrastructure the Ba'ath state hollowed out and the war then broke, and on a rural population with little capacity left to absorb them. The next shock is not a question of whether it will come, but of when, and the women who will absorb it first are the same women already absorbing the last one.

Researchers and human rights monitors have documented attacks on water infrastructure. Hydrologists and political scientists have mapped pre-war policy failures. The labor women perform to hold households together is equally central, even where national data do not adequately measure it. None of this is unknown. What remains unresolved is whether policy and financing will integrate adaptation, loss and damage, and reconstruction rather than treating them as separate tracks. Authorities and donors still face the practical task of financing electricity, staffing, and maintenance for rural water institutions. High-emitting states continue to negotiate their share of the bill. Calling Syria's water crisis a weather story keeps political responsibility out of view, and that is precisely why the framing matters.

References

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عندما تتحوّل المياه إلى سلاح وجرح: أزمة المياه في سوريا عند تقاطع الحرب والحوكمة والجندر والمناخ