An interesting piece on what got this Syria civil war going, a few years back.
Without Water, Revolution (Written by Tom Friedman, NYT))
Caveat: Friedman is full of crap as often as not, but he may be on to something here.
He sees the war through the prism of draught, and of the government's poor water policy. In Texas, we have similar issues at hand with the boom in the Eagle Ford Shale region, which also has ground water issues in an agricultural region. Eerie parallel ...
“The drought did not cause Syria’s civil war,” said the Syrian economist Samir Aita, but, he added, the failure of the government to respond to the drought played a huge role in fueling the uprising. What happened, Aita explained, was that after Assad took over in 2000 he opened up the regulated agricultural sector in Syria for big farmers, many of them government cronies, to buy up land and drill as much water as they wanted, eventually severely diminishing the water table. This began driving small farmers off the land into towns, where they had to scrounge for work.
Then, between 2006 and 2011, some 60 percent of Syria’s land mass was ravaged by the drought and, with the water table already too low and river irrigation shrunken, it wiped out the livelihoods of 800,000 Syrian farmers and herders, the United Nations reported.
“State and government was invented in this part of the world, in ancient Mesopotamia, precisely to manage irrigation and crop growing,” said Aita, “and Assad failed in that basic task.”
The best jobs in Hasakah Province, Syria’s oil-producing region, were with the oil companies. But drought refugees, virtually all of whom were Sunni Muslims, could only dream of getting hired there. “Most of those jobs went to Alawites from Tartous and Latakia,” said Zakaria, referring to the minority sect to which President Assad belongs and which is concentrated in these coastal cities. “It made people even more angry. The best jobs on our lands in our province were not for us, but for people who come from outside.”
Comment on the sectarian nature of the civil war, in contrast to the war for independence from France? The motto then:
“Religion is for God, and the country is for everyone.”
That attitude seems to no longer be popular.
This of course isn't the only point of view on this civil war, but it informs somewhat the mechanism by which so much of the population was open to radicalization: despot exploits people and resources, and massive move from rural to urban settings by a displaced population.
Recipe for revolt.