The Ecological Trauma of War in the Middle East

Environmental degradation is typically associated with war through the lens of resource scarcity creating conflict; people go to war over resources that are difficult to share. Examining how conflict in the Middle East has affected agriculture and livestock suggests that war— even just war—is futile in resolving conflict over natural resources. The intentional and unintentional weaponization of agriculture in the Middle East reveals the irony of justifying war for a greater good because it perpetuates one of the reasons people go to war, which is ecological resource scarcity itself.

Agricultural productivity is linked with economic and ecological sustainability worldwide. As the heart of the economy, culture, and livelihood in the Middle East, agriculture is crucial to sustainable recovery in regions impacted by war. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the Near East is one of the most arid regions in the world and per capita availability of arable land in the Near East is of the lowest in the world.1 This places people groups in the Middle East in a vulnerable position. The Yezidi, an Iraqi minority often targeted by the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group, are agricultural labourers whose geographically isolated land is vulnerable to IS terrorism; along with other residents in the Sinjar area of Iraq, Yezidis rely on an economy based on wheat, barley, and vegetables.2 In Yemen, where war has placed 257,000 hectares of cropland in distress, the intersectional crisis of food insecurity and human displacement has highlighted that 16.2 million Yemenis are food insecure.3

One of the ways war in the Middle East targets agriculture and livestock is through deliberate attacks on farmland and infrastructure. In Yemen, the Houthis are an insurgent group who have sought to weaken the state by attacking agricultural sites and infrastructure to damage the livelihoods of Yemenis. The Conflict and Environment Observatory, an agency that monitors and raises awareness of the environmental dimensions of war, counted 489 incidents of attacks on agricultural sites or infrastructure in southwestern Yemen in 2019, along with 220 incidents in the northern highland plains of Yemen.4 The methods to achieve such destruction included destroying water sources like wells and dropping cluster bombs in agricultural areas; the 220 incidents also include indirect attacks on infrastructure such as roads or buildings which impede the transportation of crops and livestock across the country.5

IS also targeted environmental infrastructure in Iraq. Though Iraq declared a military victory over IS in 2017, rebuilding the country and returning farmers to their homes and land has been a process slowed by the conflict’s extensive collateral damage. According to a ground report conducted by Amnesty International, IS took advantage of irrigation links by sabotaging wells with rubble, oil, and other objects and destroying pumps, cables, and generators which were essential to crop irrigation.6

Alice Martins, “An empty water tank and a sabotaged irrigation well on an abandoned farm near Sinune town north of Sinjar mountain.” Amnesty International, 2018. Fair use.

International and local forces in the Middle East have also targeted oil plants and energy sites to undermine the economies of enemy states, thereby deliberately damaging natural resources and contaminating agricultural lands. US Operation Inherent Resolve, the international military intervention against ISIL, proudly reports that it damaged or destroyed 1,620 oil infrastructures over the last two decades which had been profitable to IS.7 As a result, experts in Syria claim that groundwater has been contaminated because locals turned to makeshift oil refineries, which pollute surrounding agricultural land.8 “Last year was supposed to be a good harvest season,” said an agricultural engineer based in the Syrian Raqqa governate in 2015, “but trees did not give fruit as expected because they were covered with soot from the burners.”9 Moreover, burners are less efficient in their water use, thus reallocating water away from agricultural land along the Euphrates River.10 Soils become more saline which limits plant growth and reduces crop production and available forage for livestock.11

Agricultural land and infrastructure was damaged or neglected due to UN sanctions against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and due to its conflict with the Islamic State. The country struggles to recover with little political support for farmers. Middle East Online, 2018. Fair use.

War breaks down the regimes that enforce resource management, thus exacerbating losses of agricultural revenue and resources in the Middle East. In Palestine, Israeli settlements since the mid-1900s have unsustainably managed their human waste and garbage where Palestinian communities had previously established local or rural systems of managing waste. When it was established, the town of Beit Omar, located in the Hebron governate of Palestine, contained a small unit for wastewater treatment that has not been upgraded since Israeli communities settled nearby.12 Untreated wastewater channeled annually “for years” at the beginning of the twenty-first century into Beit Omar from Israeli settlements, coinciding with harvest times for grapes.13 The Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem estimates that around 30–35% of agricultural land in Beit Omar in October 2003 was severely damaged by wastewater dumping, affecting the income of approximately 5000 inhabitants of the village.14 More recently, the Middle East Eye reported in 2020 that sewage water was impacting the land between olive trees in 2020, where a local farmer has estimated that seven hectares of his land have been impacted by wastewater from Israeli settlements.15

Conflict over land and water blurs property rights and leads to inefficiency. There is extensive literature on the impact of Israeli land policy and war on Palestine, but environmental impacts cannot be contained to a single state, settlement, or nation. Therefore, while the IsraeliPalestinian conflict has many long-term implications, agricultural collateral damage ultimately weakens every political stakeholder near Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a fascinating case study because sovereignty over land, which is a basic ecological resource, has defined this war for decades. News articles dating back to 2003 describe the Ramallah Attack—an attack committed by a Palestinian Islamist militant group—as an aggression which prompted Israel to launch a “grand-scale” bulldozing operation over agricultural lands just north of Gaza.16 Felling orange groves became a signature move of the Israeli army, not only because the orange symbolizes “prosperity and staying power” to Israelis and Palestinians but also because citrus cultivation was a highly profitable enterprise for Palestinians.17 In a 2009 Israeli raid in Gaza, for example, citrus groves were destroyed along with fifteen houses, olive trees, and livestock according to a blogger describing her father’s travels during the 2008–2009 war between Israel and Gaza.18 The blogger, Laila El Haddad, contends that natural resources were “strategically mobilized” as a means of humiliation.19

Israeli settlers in Palestine have also taken more direct control over land and water. Israel has taken control over the headwaters of the Jordan River where, before Israeli occupation, Palestinians had access to water through pumping units. Following occupation, Israeli authorities destroyed and confiscated these units.20 Israeli settlements have also been built on and around Palestinian agricultural land; for example, settlements in the West Bank provide for Israeli livestock farms but farmers report manure dumping onto Palestinian agricultural lands and into water sources.21

Elsewhere in the Middle East, explosive weapons render farmland unusable during and after conflict. In Lebanon, conflict with Israel in 2006 prohibited farmers from accessing their fields as the harvest of stone fruit and potatoes was ready. Bombing forced farmers from their lands, impeded transportation to markets, and allowed much of the harvest to perish on the ground.22 War in Lebanon would render around twenty-five percent of agricultural

fields and pastures in Southern Lebanon inaccessible due to unexploded mines.23 Another estimate states that almost 545 cultivated fields in Lebanon became a danger due to the impacts of artillery shells, cluster bombs and landmines.24 Mines from the Soviet War in Afghanistan have contaminated up to half of workable farmland in Afghanistan, reducing crop production, killing livestock and exacerbating food insecurity to this day.25 These events on their own expose the troubling nature of ecological destruction and the broken relationship between humanity and the planet; from a human-centric worldview the implications of war are equally sobering. According to the Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS), the biggest impact of agricultural stress has been a loss of livelihoods in the Near East, which, paired with the COVID-19 pandemic, stretches supplies far and thin.26 CEOBS notes it is no coincidence that 2,565 square kilometers of agricultural land are under distress while Yemen is experiencing near-famine.27 Indicators in the last decade reveal how periods of hunger follow extended periods of conflict; in 2014, the FAO reported that 13.5 million people in Syria were in need of humanitarian assistance after conflict limited food production, marketing and imports.29 In Iraq, eighty percent of sheep and goats were reportedly lost in 2016 and 8.2 million people were in need of humanitarian assistance after over three decades of war.30

Environmental degradation directly causes a decline in crop yield and indirectly contributes to food insecurity through lost income, slowed economic growth, and debt. In Afghanistan, gender equality, one of the backbones of economic development, is susceptible to growth and decline in the food industry as agriculture and livestock are integral to the livelihoods of both men and women. According to Rashid et. al., women are particularly vulnerable to the blockage of pastoral and agricultural land because their autonomy is interlinked with agricultural work.30 Of employed female workers in Afghanistan, eleven percent are employed in agriculture and fifty-nine percent in livestock.31 In Lebanon, farmers were heavily indebted by the 2006 War and other conflicts which cost agriculture, fisheries and forestry around $280 million USD.32 Bombardments directed at southern Lebanon created the most financial damage in lost harvests which, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), cost around $232 million.33 Farmers who usually repaid debts during the October harvest were unable to repay a debt that lasted due to the destruction of capital and contamination of farmland.34 This data from the FAO was published in 2006. In 2020, Lebanese economic magazine Le Commerce du Levant reported that the country continues to collapse due to agricultural losses and farm debt.35 The agricultural trauma of conflict persists fifteen years later.

Economic loss is evident in Syria, Yemen, and Iraq where conflicts are, according to the FAO, one of the most important causes of food insecurity in the Near East. In Syria, the cost of animal feed increased by 168 percent in 2015, compromising its ability to market and import meat.36 In Yemen, twenty-six percent of the population lives in areas under emergency levels of food insecurity.37 The conflict between Iraq and IS decreased access to irrigation by twenty percent between 2014 and 2017 and agricultural production as a whole by forty percent since 2014.38

Psychological trauma and ecological loss need to be explored as well. Laila El Haddad notes in her journal entries that the dispossession of property, community, livestock, and agriculture in Palestinian communities is an affront to “identity and personhood.”39 A blogger in Iraq under the pseudonym of Riverbend noted “Each tree is so unique, it feels like a member of the family,” after American military forces destroyed orange trees during the invasion of Iraq.40 The sight of a palm tree decimated on the ground evoked for her the image of a dead corpse.41 Defeat takes many forms, but one that “severs ancient people-land connections” has the potential to damage an entire communal history.42

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Iraq war are among conflicts across the globe that introduce conflicting narratives on Western intervention in war because forces backed by superpowers are accused of deliberately destroying environmental resources.

Foreign intervention is politically warranted where it can uphold a greater good, which is usually described as long-term peace and the defeat of an enemy which would have done more harm than the good that results from its defeat. What is left out of this cost-benefit analysis is ecological trauma, which, according to El Haddad and Riverbend, can be psychological as well as physical. If foreign intervention in the Middle East contributes to destroying both short-term and long-term ecological, economic, and cultural connections to land, it must be reassessed.

In 2001, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan introduced the first International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of Environment in War and Armed Conflict. Annan noted that modern warfare needs environmental rules of engagement the same way human collateral damage is regulated in armed conflict.43 The costs of war must be kept to a minimum. From this perspective, previous cost-benefit analyses of war which condemned war’s impact on civilians were not comprehensive enough because they did not take into account the long-term destruction of life that comes with ecological trauma in their calculation of net present lives lost. Given the extent of agricultural damage done to lands in the Middle East and the impact it has had on economic and social development, the extension of rules of engagement is futile because it denies that war fundamentally and permanently alters humanity’s relationship to land.

In addition to the impact of war on civilians, the collateral damage of war on agriculture and livestock in the Middle East is another indication that war’s outcome cannot be temporally or geographically contained and cannot be predicted. If war can avoid oil sites, avoid vulnerable economic sectors, maintain environmental policy, and respect land and water rights would it be war? Governments must invest in repairing agricultural damage, but until war is no longer a threat to the environment in the Middle East, an end to war is the only sustainable solution.

International Studies major (international affairs and global policy track)