Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.
BAGHDAD (April 13, 2003)—They lie across the floor in tens of thousands of pieces, the priceless antiquities of Iraq’s history. The looters had gone from shelf to shelf, systematically pulling down the statues and pots and amphorae of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Medes, the Persians, and the Greeks and hurling them on to the concrete.
Our feet crunched on the wreckage of 5,000-year-old marble plinths and stone statuary and pots that had endured every siege of Baghdad, every invasion of Iraq throughout history—only to be destroyed when America came to “liberate” the city. The Iraqis did it. They did it to their own history, physically destroying the evidence of their own nation’s thousands of years of civilization.
Not since the Taliban embarked on their orgy of destruction against the Buddhas of Bamiyan and the statues in the museum of Kabul—perhaps not since the Second World War or earlier—have so many archaeological treasures been wantonly and systematically smashed to pieces.
“This is what our own people did to their history,” the man in the gray gown said as we flicked our torches yesterday across the piles of once perfect Sumerian pots and Greek statues, now headless, armless, in the storeroom of Iraq’s National Archaeological Museum. “We need the American soldiers to guard what we have left. We need the Americans here. We need policemen.” But all that the museum guard, Abdul-Setar Abdul-Jaber, experienced yesterday was gun battles between looters and local residents, the bullets hissing over our heads outside the museum and skittering up the walls of neighboring apartment blocks.
“Look at this,” he said, picking up a massive hunk of pottery, its delicate patterns and beautifully decorated lips coming to a sudden end where the jar—perhaps two-feet-high in its original form—had been smashed into four pieces. “This was Assyrian.” The Assyrians ruled almost 2,000 years before Christ.
And what were the Americans doing as the new rulers of Baghdad? Why, yesterday morning they were recruiting Saddam Hussein’s hated former policemen to restore law and order on their behalf. (The last army to do anything like this was [Lord Louis] Mountbatten’s force in Southeast Asia, which employed the defeated Japanese army to control the streets of Saigon—with their bayonets fixed—after the recapture of Indo-China in 1945.)
But “liberation” has already turned into occupation. Faced by a crowd of angry Iraqis in Firdos Square demanding a new Iraqi government “for our protection and security and peace,” U.S. Marines, who should have been providing that protection, stood shoulder to shoulder facing them, guns at the ready. The reality, which the Americans—and, of course, Mr. [U.S. defense secretary Donald] Rumsfeld—fail to understand is that, under Saddam Hussein, the poor and deprived were always the Shia Muslims, the middle classes always the Sunnis, just as Saddam himself was a Sunni. So it is the Sunnis who are now suffering plunder at the hands of the Shia.
And so the gun-fighting that broke out yesterday between property owners and looters was, in effect, a conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims. By failing to end this violence—by stoking ethnic hatred through their inactivity—the Americans are now provoking a civil war in Baghdad.
Yesterday evening, I drove through the city for more than an hour. Hundreds of streets are now barricaded with breezeblocks, burnt cars, and tree trunks, watched over by armed men who are ready to kill strangers who threaten their homes or shops. Which is just how the civil war began in Beirut in 1975.
A few U.S. Marine patrols did dare to venture into the suburbs yesterday—positioning themselves next to hospitals which had already been looted—but fires burnt across the city at dusk for the third consecutive day. The municipality building was blazing away last night, and on the horizon other great fires were sending columns of smoke miles high into the air.
Too little, too late. Yesterday, a group of chemical engineers and water purification workers turned up at the U.S. Marine headquarters, pleading for protection so they could return to their jobs. Electrical supply workers came along, too. But Baghdad is already a city at war with itself, at the mercy of gunmen and thieves.
There is no electricity in Baghdad—as there is no water and no law and no order—and so we stumbled in the darkness of the museum basement, tripping over toppled statues and stumbling into broken winged bulls. When I shone my torch over one far shelf, I drew in my breath. Every pot and jar—“3,500 BC” it said on one shelf corner—had been bashed to pieces.
Why? How could they do this? Why, when the city was already burning, when anarchy had been let loose and less than three months after U.S. archaeologists and Pentagon officials met to discuss the country’s treasures and put the Baghdad Archaeological Museum on a military database—did the Americans allow the mobs to destroy the priceless heritage of ancient Mesopotamia?
For well over 200 years, Western and local archaeologists have gathered up the remnants of this center of early civilization from palaces, ziggurats, and 3,000-year-old graves. Their tens of thousands of handwritten card index files—often in English and in graceful nineteenth-century handwriting—now lie strewn amid the broken statuary. I picked up a tiny shard. “Late 2nd century, no. 1680” was written in pencil on the inside.
To reach the storeroom, the mobs had broken through massive steel doors, entering from a back courtyard and heaving statues and treasures to cars and trucks.
The looters had left only a few hours before I arrived and no one—not even the museum guard in the gray gown—had any idea how much they had taken. A glass case that had once held 40,000-year-old stone and flint objects had been smashed open. It lay empty. No one knows what happened to the Assyrian reliefs from the royal palace of Khorsabad, nor the 5,000-year-old seals nor the 4,500-year-old gold leaf earrings once buried with Sumerian princesses. It will take decades to sort through what they have left, the broken stone torsos, the tomb treasures, the bits of jewelry glinting amid the piles of smashed pots.
The mobs that came here—Shia Muslims, for the most part, from the hovels of Saddam City—probably had no idea of the value of the pots or statues. Their destruction appears to have been the result of ignorance as much as fury. In the vast museum library, only a few books—mostly mid-nineteenth-century archaeological works—appeared to have been stolen or destroyed. Looters set little value in books.
I found a complete set of the Geographical Journal from 1893 to 1936 still intact—lying next to them was a paperback titled Baghdad, The City of Peace—but thousands of card index sheets had been flung from their boxes over stairwells and banisters.
Even as the Americans encircled Baghdad, Saddam Hussein’s soldiers showed almost the same contempt for its treasures as the looters. Their slit trenches and empty artillery positions are still clearly visible in the museum lawns, one of them dug beside a huge stone statue of a winged bull.
Only a few weeks ago, Jabir Khalil Ibrahim, the director of Iraq’s State Board of Antiquities, referred to the museum’s contents as “the heritage of the nation.” They were, he said, “not just things to see and enjoy. We get strength from them to look to the future. They represent the glory of Iraq.”
Mr. Ibrahim has vanished, like so many government employees in Baghdad, and Mr. Abdul-Jaber and his colleagues are now trying to defend what is left of the country’s history with a collection of Kalashnikov rifles. “We don’t want to have guns, but everyone must have them now,” he told me. “We have to defend ourselves because the Americans have let this happen. They made a war against one man—so why do they abandon us to this war and these criminals?”
Half an hour later, I contacted the civil affairs unit of the U.S. Marines in Saadun Street and gave them the exact location of the museum and the condition of its contents. A captain told me that “we’re probably going to get down there.” Too late. Iraq’s history had already been trashed by the looters whom the Americans unleashed on the city during their “liberation.”
BAGHDAD (April 15, 2003)—So yesterday was the burning of books. First came the looters, then the arsonists. It was the final chapter in the sacking of Baghdad. The National Library and Archives—a priceless treasure of Ottoman historical documents, including the old royal archives of Iraq—were turned to ashes in 3,000 degrees of heat. Then the library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowment was set ablaze.
I saw the looters. One of them cursed me when I tried to reclaim a book of Islamic law from a boy of no more than ten. Amid the ashes of Iraqi history, I found a file blowing in the wind outside: pages of handwritten letters between the court of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who started the Arab revolt against the Turks for Lawrence of Arabia, and the Ottoman rulers of Baghdad.
And the Americans did nothing. All over the filthy yard they blew, letters of recommendation to the courts of Arabia, demands for ammunition for troops, reports on the theft of camels and attacks on pilgrims, all in delicate handwritten Arabic script. I was holding in my hands the last Baghdad vestiges of Iraq’s written history. But for Iraq, this is Year Zero; with the destruction of the antiquities in the Museum of Archaeology on Saturday and the burning of the National Archives and then the Koranic library, the cultural identity of Iraq is being erased. Why? Who set these fires? For what insane purpose is this heritage being destroyed?
When I caught sight of the Koranic library burning—flames 100 feet high were bursting from the windows—I raced to the offices of the occupying power, the U.S. Marines’ Civil Affairs Bureau. An officer shouted to a colleague that “this guy says some biblical [sic] library is on fire.” I gave the map location, the precise name—in Arabic and English. I said the smoke could be seen from three miles away and it would take only five minutes to drive there. Half an hour later, there wasn’t an American at the scene—and the flames were shooting 200 feet into the air.
There was a time when the Arabs said that their books were written in Cairo, printed in Beirut, and read in Baghdad. Now they burn libraries in Baghdad. In the National Archives were not just the Ottoman records of the caliphate, but even the dark years of the country’s modern history, handwritten accounts of the 1980–88 Iran-Iraq war, with personal photographs and military diaries, and microfiche copies of Arabic newspapers going back to the early 1900s.
But the older files and archives were on the upper floors of the library where petrol must have been used to set fire so expertly to the building. The heat was such that the marble flooring had buckled upwards and the concrete stairs that I climbed had been cracked.
The papers on the floor were almost too hot to touch, bore no print or writing, and crumbled into ash the moment I picked them up. Again, standing in this shroud of blue smoke and embers, I asked the same question: Why?
So, as an all-too-painful reflection on what this means, let me quote from the shreds of paper that I found on the road outside, blowing in the wind, written by long-dead men who wrote to the Sublime Porte in Istanbul or to the Court of Sharif of Mecca with expressions of loyalty and who signed themselves “your slave.” There was a request to protect a camel convoy of tea, rice, and sugar, signed by Husni Attiya al-Hijazi (recommending Abdul Ghani-Naim and Ahmed Kindi as honest merchants), and a request for perfume and advice from Jaber al-Ayashi of the royal court of Sharif Hussein to Baghdad to warn of robbers in the desert. “This is just to give you our advice for which you will be highly rewarded,” Ayashi says. “If you don’t take our advice, then we have warned you.” A touch of Saddam there, I thought. The date was 1912.
Some of the documents list the cost of bullets, military horses, and artillery for Ottoman armies in Baghdad and Arabia; others record the opening of the first telephone exchange in the Hejaz—soon to be Saudi Arabia—while one recounts, from the village of Azrak in modern-day Jordan, the theft of clothes from a camel train by Ali bin Kassem, who attacked his interrogators “with a knife and tried to stab them but was restrained and later bought off.” There is a nineteenth-century letter of recommendation for a merchant, Yahyia Messoudi, “a man of the highest morals, of good conduct and who works with the [Ottoman] government.” This, in other words, was the tapestry of Arab history—all that is left of it, which fell into The Independent’s hands as the mass of documents crackled in the immense heat of the ruins.
For almost a thousand years, Baghdad was the cultural capital of the Arab world, the most literate population in the Middle East. Genghis Khan’s grandson burnt the city in the thirteenth century and, so it was said, the Tigris River ran black with the ink of books. Yesterday, the black ashes of thousands of ancient documents filled the skies of Iraq. Why?
Clean air, water, and food are essential to survival, therefore civilian protection during and after armed conflict requires the effective protection of the environment. There is growing recognition by states, militaries, and international organizations of the polluting impact of conflict and military practices. The term “toxic remnants of war” (TRW) has been coined to facilitate greater scrutiny of the subject.
TRW can be defined as: “Any toxic or radiological substance resulting from military activities that forms a hazard to humans and ecosystems.” “Direct TRW” are an immediate result of military activity. For example, pollution released from attacking industrial targets or toxic residue resulting from munitions use. “Indirect TRW” result from events or conditions connected to conflict. For example, during the 2003 invasion of Iraq a number of industrial sites were damaged by conflict or simply abandoned. These derelict and unsecured sites were subsequently looted, exposing people to highly toxic chemical and radioactive substances.
The ongoing war in Ukraine has generated both direct and indirect TRW impacts.
Soon after violent secessionist conflict erupted in eastern Ukraine in 2014, information began to emerge on the environmental impacts of war across the highly industrialized Donbas region. Although obtaining accurate data was difficult, indications were that the conflict had resulted in potentially long-term damage to the environment that posed a number of civilian health risks.
The environmental legacy of conflict and military activities is rarely prioritized in post-conflict response, in spite of the short- and long-term impacts on civilian health and livelihoods. Warfare in highly industrialized areas has the potential to generate new pollution incidents and exacerbate existing problems. The conflict in Ukraine has done both, as well as damage the area’s natural environment.
With the signing of the second round of Minsk agreements in February 2015, hope re-emerged that a peaceful solution might be possible. But should the fragile truce collapse, an enlarged conflict would pose new and grave risks to the region’s people and environment.
Prior to the outbreak of the war, more than 5,300 industrial enterprises were operating in the prewar Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts (provinces). Initial war damage to the region’s industry has been widespread, ranging from direct damage to industrial installations to enterprises simply stopping production because of the lack of raw materials, energy, work-force, or distribution channels.
In some cases, the disruption led to accidental releases of pollutants from shelled or bombed facilities. In others, facilities have been forced to shift to more polluting technologies that have compromised regional air quality. Among the dozens of facilities damaged by fighting were the Zasyadko coal mine, a chemicals depot at Yasynivskyi coke and chemical works in Makiyvka, the Lysychyansk oil refinery, an explosives factory at Petrovske, and a fuel-oil storage facility at Slavyansk thermal power plant.
Coal mining has been the backbone of the economy of the Donbas region since the nineteenth century. With the intermittent disruption of the electricity supply across the conflict area, ventilation systems and water pumps in coal mines failed, resulting in flooding and the release of accumulated gases after ventilation restarted. The often irreparable flooding not only damages the mines but also waterlogs adjacent areas and pollutes groundwater. By April 2015, permanent or temporary flooding resulting from the military conflict had been reported at more than ten mines.
The Zasyadko mine in Donetsk used to produce four million tons of coal annually and was one of the region’s economic flagships. An explosive release of methane in March 2015 killed 33 of the 200 miners underground at the time. Even though this was not the first such accident at Zasyadko (which is ranked among the mining industry’s deadliest mines), the chair of the mine’s board attributed the incident to heavy shelling at nearby Donetsk Airport, where fighting continued until late January 2015.
There have been numerous media reports about war damage caused to Donbas’ water supply, including in and around Luhansk and Donetsk—cities with a combined prewar population of 1.5 million. While repair work to the water infrastructure was carried out—often under direct fire—periods of irregular supply were common. Less well documented is the impact of the conflict on drinking water quality, but one can reasonably assume the disruptions have caused widespread deterioration.
Limited sampling by the Ukraine-based NGO Environment-People-Law confirmed the expected range of some “war chemicals” from the use of conventional weapons in impact zones. Similarly, large quantities of damaged military equipment and potentially hazardous building rubble will require disposal. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense also raised concerns that depleted uranium weapons may have been used in the fighting around Donetsk Airport, and proposed to determine whether this was the case when conditions allowed.
The conflict has also damaged the region’s numerous nature protection areas, from armed groups occupying administrative buildings to the impact of fighting and the movement of heavy vehicles within nature reserves. The restoration of large tracts of agricultural and other land for normal cultivation and use will require considerable effort too, and will be complicated by the presence of new minefields and unexploded ordnance.
As is common for armed conflicts in heavily developed areas, a large proportion of the pollution impact may not come directly from the fighting but from damage to industrial infrastructure and the disruption of everyday economic activities. A good example from the Donbas region was seen in data from its only functioning automated air quality monitoring station, located in the town of Schastya in the Luhansk oblast and which remained in operation until November 2014. The data demonstrate that peak concentrations of airborne contamination are not only associated with periods of combat. In this case, instead, the pollution peaks were linked to a reduction in the supply of high-grade coal for the Luhanska power plant in August 2014.
Coal supplies were first restricted when a bridge in Kondrashevskaya-Novaya was destroyed. Then an electrical substation was shelled, which disconnected the area from the rest of Ukraine’s electricity grid. As a result, the Luhanska power plant, which was responsible for supplying more than 90 percent of the oblast’s electricity, was forced to simultaneously increase production while turning to lower-grade coal. This caused a clear deterioration in air quality.
It is impossible to predict whether further damage will be wreaked on the people and the environment of Donbas. Insecurity continues to impact basic environmental governance on both sides of the conflict, while cooperation across the front line—even on urgent humanitarian issues—remains a remote prospect.
Because of the great potential for long-term civilian health risks from the conflict pollution, efforts to collect systematic data on pollution and health outcomes should start immediately, as must preparations for remediation. The financial and technical requirements for the comprehensive assessment and remediation of contaminated sites will be considerable.
There is consensus among experts, including the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), that legal protection for the environment during war is inadequate and needs further development. A major limitation of treaty-based international humanitarian law is the high threshold of damage required for it to take effect and the fact that obligations for remediation are not covered. Customary international law is thought to have good potential to address these deficiencies, but the experiences from the bans on land mines and cluster munitions suggest that a new system of environmental protection and restoration may be required.
As the ICRC noted in 2011, we need to consider creating new systems to provide the environmental assistance required to protect both civilians and the environment from conflict pollution: “Given the complexity, for example, of repairing damaged plants and installations or cleaning up polluted soil and rubble, it would also be desirable to develop norms on international assistance and cooperation…. Such norms would open new and promising avenues for handling the environmental consequences of war.”
In April of 2015, a joint EU-UN-World Bank needs assessment estimated that a two-year effort to assess and respond to the most urgent environmental damage caused by the ongoing Ukraine conflict would cost $30 million. The eventual cost of restoration was impossible to calculate.
The broader context for the eventual remediation of the environmental damage should include the radical modernization of the region’s notoriously unsustainable industry, which has for years presented direct and grave risks for its environment and people. In this way, this highly unwelcome conflict may, in the end, offer a rare and welcome opportunity to eventually “green” the black and brown coalfields of Donbas.
Prior to the 2011 uprising, the population of Syria was 21.5 million, of whom approximately one-third lived in rural areas. Deserts make up most of eastern Syria, with roughly one-third of the country fertile land. Around 55 percent of the country comprises natural pastures, steppe, desert, and mountainous areas. Natural resources include petroleum, phosphates, chrome and manganese ores, asphalt, iron ore, rock salt, marble, gypsum, and hydropower.
In spite of some animal and plant species having gone extinct, preconflict assessments in Syria reported a rich biodiversity. The country had twenty-six protected areas where mammals could not be hunted. (Although there are no designated natural parks, there were plans to establish national protected areas to ensure the conservation of fragile ecosystems.)
Between 2006 and 2010, Syria went through five successive years of drought. This had a serious impact on the agricultural sector. Around 1.3 million people were affected, and an estimated 800,000 famers and herders lost almost all their livestock. An estimated 300,000 farmer families migrated to the cities. Many resettled in informal urban housing areas, leaving them more vulnerable to environmental hazards caused by poor air quality and contaminated drinking water.
Wars leave a toxic footprint in their wake. Considering the scale and duration of the ongoing Syrian conflict, it is beyond doubt that military targeting decisions, the widespread damage to populated areas, the vast quantity of weapons and munitions expended, and the breakdown of environmental services and governance have caused grave environmental damage, with long-lasting effects that will constrain post-conflict recovery in Syria.
Since the outbreak of hostilities in 2011, Syrians have witnessed violence and destruction on an enormous scale. As of October 2015, the fighting in Syria had caused the deaths of more than 210,000 people, with more than four million forced to flee their homes.
Aleppo, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on Earth and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, has suffered severe damage. Of its three million inhabitants in 2011, 1.8 million have been displaced, both in and outside the city. Since the outbreak of the civil war, more than 52 percent of Aleppo’s housing units have been destroyed or suffered partial damage. Of its 123 neighborhoods, 21 have been left uninhabitable, while 53 are only partially functioning.
Damage to properties has generated millions of tons of rubble, which can contain a number of hazardous materials—including asbestos, cement, heavy metals, domestic chemicals, and combustion products—that can have detrimental effects on the environment and public health.
The national Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allied militias have increasingly resorted to the use of heavy-caliber, explosive weapons and cluster munitions in populated areas, and have even used chemical weapons.
Mortar bombs, artillery shells, barrel bombs, aircraft bombs, and missiles are conventional weapons that detonate to affect an area with blast and fragmentation. Data indicate that, worldwide, approximately 90 percent of those killed and injured when explosive weapons are used in populated areas are civilians.
Rebel forces, using a wide variety of conventional—often-improvised—weapons, have also carried out serious abuses, including indiscriminate attacks on civilians. In its attempt to create and hold a caliphate state encompassing much of Syria and northern Iraq, the so-called Islamic State (IS) jihadist army has used a range of tactics considered contrary to international humanitarian law, including the indiscriminate shelling of besieged towns, mass executions, slavery, and the use of mustard gas.
Intense fighting in urban areas involves the use of a variety of small- and medium-caliber munitions, explosives from mortars, artillery rounds, bombs, rocket-propelled grenades, and surface-to-surface and air-to-surface missiles. Low-order detonations—i.e., not fully detonated bombs—can result in the leaking of explosives such as RDX, DNT, and TNT, contaminating soil, surface water, and groundwater.
Aside from conventionally manufactured weapons, the SAA have also used so-called “barrel bombs”—large oil drums, gas cylinders, and water tanks filled with high explosives such as RDX, TNT, and scrap metal for fragmentation effects. Barrel bombs (some weighing more than 1,500 kilograms, or 1.7 tons) tend to contain a large amount of explosive material. Due to the difficulty of delivering them accurately to a target, barrel bombs tend to cause significant collateral damage.
The use of improvised rockets has been documented since 2012. These rockets are made by attaching rocket motors to large bombs, which are then launched indiscriminately into urban areas. Large versions are nicknamed “elephant rockets” because of their size and the noise they make when launched. They are short-range, destructive, and inaccurate.
When buildings are hit by munitions or damaged through pressure waves resulting from explosions, building materials are pulverized, generating large amounts of dust. Pulverized building materials (PBMs) are typically a mixture of cement, metals, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), silica, asbestos, and synthetic fibers. Exposure to these materials can have a serious impact on health, both during the conflict and during post-conflict disposal.
Concrete is generally made of Portland cement mixed with water and coarse aggregates. Portland cement is a mixture of oxides of calcium, aluminum, iron, silicon, and magnesium. It also may contain selenium, thallium, and other impurities, all of which can become environmental contaminants and a hazard to human health.
The few studies that have been undertaken have found the rubble formed during conflict to have a higher proportion of combustion products, such as dioxins and furans, than typical demolition rubble. Potentially toxic PBMs are generated by high temperatures resulting from explosions.
Years of fighting have generated vast quantities of rubble and debris from damaged buildings in many districts in Syria’s cities. One December 2013 investigation reported that 1.2 million houses—or one-third of all homes in Syria—had been damaged or destroyed.
Before the war, Homs was Syria’s third-largest city, with more than 800,000 inhabitants. Famous for its Old City, Homs was a tourist hotspot known for its multicultural mix of communities. A May 2014 UN-Habitat assessment concluded that 50 percent of the neighborhoods in Homs had been heavily damaged and 28 percent partially damaged.
Heavy fighting erupted in 2011 and continued until government forces reclaimed control of the city in 2014, after a two-year siege. Almost half a million inhabitants were displaced and the intense fighting has had an enormous impact on the city. UN-Habitat analyses and UNISAT satellite damage assessments reveal severe destruction in the city’s residential areas. More than 54 percent of Homs’ housing is uninhabitable, and 26 of its 36 neighborhoods are completely or partially non-functional.
In addition to large numbers of people killed and injured directly from explosive weapons use, still more are affected by the damage that explosive weapons do to essential infrastructure such as schools, hospitals, housing, and water and sanitation systems. Living under bombardment also causes severe psychological distress, which often continues to impact the lives of those affected even after they have fled the area or the conflict has ceased.
The risk of explosive remnants of war can remain for decades after a conflict has ended. Munitions residues spread out over urban or rural areas during heavy fighting could include heavy metals such as tungsten, lead, or even depleted uranium, as well as energetic materials that make up explosives, such as RDX, PBX, and TNT and highly toxic rocket propellants. The targeting of military storage facilities during prolonged military campaigns in and around Aleppo also may have generated localized chemical hazards as well as unexploded ordnance (UXO).
Prolonged heavy fighting can leave behind pockets of contamination including heavy metals from munitions and toxic munitions constituents. Civilians remaining in or returning to these areas may be at risk of mixed exposures to munitions residues and pulverized building materials.
Direct damage to industrial sites in Homs, Hama, Damascus, and Aleppo has been reported, with buildings destroyed, burned, or looted, while some factories have been taken over by armed groups.
Around 90 percent of the pharmaceutical industry’s facilities were located in Aleppo, Homs, and rural Damascus. It is estimated that twenty-five pharmaceutical plants have been destroyed. Aleppo’s critical infrastructure has all but collapsed, as has law and order. The al-Sheikh Najjar industrial zone, situated fifteen kilometers (nine miles) from Aleppo, was once on its way to becoming the biggest industrial zone in the Middle East. It was intended to host 6,000 companies at its establishment in 2004, and 1,250 were in operation when the conflict started in 2011.
The destruction of water, sewage, and electricity systems can have serious repercussions. The U.S. bombing of electrical power facilities in the 1991 Gulf War shut down Iraq’s water purification and sewage treatment plants—leading to outbreaks of gastroenteritis, cholera, and typhoid—and is thought to have caused an estimated 100,000 civilian deaths and a doubling of the infant mortality rate.
Water supply networks have regularly been targeted in the Syrian conflict. Dams, water pipes, and waste treatment plants have been damaged or destroyed due to attacks and counterattacks, by both regime and rebel forces.
A pumping station in Al Khafsah in Aleppo stopped working on May 10, 2014, after a military attack. This incident caused panic in the city, when nearly three million people lost access to water. A similar incident was reported in Aleppo, on November 9, 2012, when aerial bombing wrecked a water pipeline. Residents of Hama and Homs lost their water supply for several weeks, increasing the risk of waterborne diseases. In Aleppo, damage to the sewage system, which resulted in the contamination of drinking water, posed a serious risk to the population’s health, as the price of fuel has skyrocketed, limiting the ability to boil water.
Many power plants have been damaged. Loss of power has had a serious impact on the water distribution and sanitation systems, which were already inadequate prior to the conflict. Many pumping stations have been damaged and are unable to operate. The situation became particularly serious during the first half of 2014, when large areas of the Aleppo and Deir ez-Zor governorates were completely cut off from running water. According to the World Health Organization, the availability of safe water in July 2014 was one-third that of pre-crisis levels.
Syria’s electricity network has increasingly become a military target during the conflict. By early 2013, Syria’s minister of electricity claimed that more than 30 power stations were inactive and at least 40 percent of the country’s high-voltage power lines had been attacked.
In August 2014, a group armed with shells, mortars, and light weapons targeted a plant near Hama in an attempt to take control of it. As the most prominent power plant in the central area, it was considered a key target. The plant was severely damaged.
The same plant was attacked again in November 2014, with rockets and shells causing further damage. One shell hit a diesel oil tank, causing a fire that consumed an estimated 1,350,000 liters (357,000 gallons) of diesel. Other power plants affected by the conflict include a thermal power plant east of Aleppo, the Zeyzoun power plant between Idlib and Homs, and the al-Zara plant between Homs and Hama. The latter two were severely damaged.
Because transformers contain PCBs, conflict damage has the potential to cause the release of PCBs into the environment from damaged power stations, substations, and distribution stations.
An attack on a government munitions depot in August 2013 resulted in a major explosion that killed forty people. Widespread dispersal of a range of munitions constituents, heavy metals, and propellants is likely to present a long-term local environmental and public health concern.
Munitions, explosives, and other military materials contain a range of potentially hazardous elements and compounds. Common metal constituents in small and light weapons ammunition include lead, copper, mercury, antimony, and tungsten. Lead makes up 95 to 97 percent of the metallic components of military ammunitions and grenades.
Toxic materials prevalent in munitions include dinitrotoluene (DNT), trinitrotoluene (TNT), hexahydrotrinitrotriazine (RDX), and octahydrotetranitrotetrazocine (HMX). Other toxic substances often found in weapons include solid or liquid propellants for various types of rockets and missiles, such as hydrazine, nitroglycerin, nitroguanidine, nitrocellulose, and 2,4-dinitrotoluene. Various perchlorate formulations are employed in missile, rocket, and gun propellants.
Most explosive compounds are relatively persistent in the environment. TNT may be transformed by sunlight or microbial action into compounds more toxic than itself. RDX, HMX, and perchlorate appear to be common groundwater contaminants, while TNT is generally not. Whether solid, liquid, or vaporized, these substances have the potential to harm human health, depending on dose, duration, and route of exposure.
Conflicts involving state and non-state actors make determining strict liability and accountability for environmental damage and its humanitarian consequences challenging, but states and civic society must develop new systems of response and assistance to improve the protection of civilians and the environment upon which they depend.
According to the United Nations, as of early 2017, armed conflicts had forcibly displaced 65.3 million people, with some fleeing to other parts of their own lands while others joined a tide of 21 million seeking safety in other countries. More than half of those fleeing conflict and persecution came from just three war-torn nations—Syria, Afghanistan, and Somalia. It is much harder to flee the horrific conflict in Yemen, where war has forced 3 million from their homes and 2.2 million children from their schools, and left 7.3 million undernourished in a country where Saudi aircraft routinely drop U.S.-supplied cluster bombs on civilian populations.
When the hail of bullets and rain of bombs begin, the flood of targeted humanity gathers and soon starts to run. Like so many other human-caused phenomena, refugee flight was not the real environmental problem when the Earth was a sea of wilderness dotted with islands of human disturbance. Now, however, the situation is reversed and the oceans of humanity cause serious damage when whipped up by the storms of war.
This has not been a mere side effect of armed human conflict; the wall of displaced humanity rolls over a countryside not as a ripple effect but as a tidal wave of great and destructive force. Like any flood, the fresh becomes the dirty, the clean becomes the unhealthy, and entire habitats are swallowed up in diseased destruction.
Beautiful little children and caring women—the main channel of most rivers of war refugees—become part of cholera-producing, typhus-carrying, eco-trampling, resource-gobbling waves of misery. Often, they precipitate even more conflict, into a kind of mutually reinforcing dynamic of tragedy. Approximately 34,000 people—more than half of whom are under age 18—are driven from their homes daily.
From Burma to Rwanda, from Somalia to Afghanistan, the tremendous numbers add up to half a percent of humanity, nearly one in every 200 of us on Earth. More than 90 percent of the armed conflict since World War II—despite the high-profile interstate shooting wars—has been internal. While bombs, bullets, and land mines have taken a tremendous toll, the direct cutoff of food and potable water has taken an even greater toll in those conflict areas. In the conflict zones, more than 100 million people are chronically malnourished.
The problem of war refugees became worse, rather than better, in the final quarter of the twentieth century and then dramatically worsened again in the new millennium. In the early 1960s, the number of international refugees was estimated at a bit more than one million. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported 2.8 million international refugees in 1976. That figure swelled to nearly 19 million by 1993.
In 1997, an astonishing 63 percent of Liberians were refugees. Forty-five percent of Rwandans and Bosnians were refugees, as were 20 percent of all Afghanis. To imagine the impact of the returning Jordanians and Palestinians—evicted from Kuwait following the war—visualize the crisis if the United States were forced to embrace a sudden increase of 30 million in one year—the proportional equivalent to Jordan’s 12 percent growth due to immigration of war refugees.
In 2015, the UNHCR reported that wars in hotspots like Sudan, Yemen, and Syria had helped drive the number of desperate refugees to a global record of 59.5 million. In 2017, 4.9 million Syrians, 2.7 million Afghans, and 1.1 million Somalis fled over their borders, and the numbers just increase as the world fails to rein in destructive conflict.
One of the most opportunistic and cynical treatments of refugees is to turn them into proxy troops, as the United States did, first to Cubans fleeing Castro and, two decades later, Somocistas running from Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Civilians in flight from civil war in the early 1970s were armed by the Indian government and pitted against Pakistan just as Afghanis seeking refuge were given guns and propelled against the Soviets. The Russians did the same to Chechens fleeing from Grozny in 1999. Palestinians have historically been trained and armed by Arab states to fight Israel, and Kurds have been used with little regard by both Iran and Turkey, against each other.
Compounding the problems of refugee movement is the ecological and economic lack of skill when demobilization succeeds the peace accord. The dispossessed know how to make their living with their weapons, and everyone is telling them to stop carrying the only tools they know how to use. Making war has taught them to abuse the land, not care for it. Taught to believe that the greatest goal is destruction, now they are being told to stoop to encourage delicate life.
“Most of them did not have any profession…. And now—in a disarmed situation … the only thing that they know how to do is to kill.” So said Graca Machel, Mozambican children’s rights spokesperson and widow of Nelson Mandela.
We need only look at examples of attempted or temporary demobilization—Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia—to see the hardball facts: declaring peace or a cease-fire is not enough. The war may be over, cantonment may be called complete, but the land is still suffering from buried mines and the other dangers. While former army or guerrilla soldiers are reluctantly learning to make an honest living (many still eager for the swashbuckling days of parading with weaponry; of feeling powerful in a frightening time), they often do a poor job at tedious farm and factory labor. Soil exhaustion, erosion, and the overuse of chemicals is part of the mark of a former military man behind the tractor, spray-rig, or hoe. As the Earth’s ecology continues to unravel, so does every peace accord signed in hope.
Between 2008 and 2015, more than 22 million people were displaced by floods, hurricanes, wildfires, and rising seas. With anthropogenic climate chaos now upon us, scores of millions more stand to lose their homes, lands, cities, even entire island nations in the coming twenty to thirty years.
When we solve the problem of war, all the rest will be far less difficult. The root problem lies in conflict management. Instead of turning to generals, security studies experts, and politicians whose campaigns are funded by war contractors, it is long past time to turn to activist leaders in civil society, to scholars of strategic nonviolence, and to elected officials untainted by war profits. With a serious public discourse on alternative methods of security—focused on constructive creative conflict management methods—we can begin to staunch the flow of blood, refugees, and environmental devastation.
I met Roya on my first day while visiting the Pakistan-Afghan border, on a dusty road in Peshawar. It was just weeks after the 2002 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, and I was traveling as a representative of the human rights group I cofounded called Global Exchange. A young girl approached me, her head cocked to one side, her hand outstretched, begging for money.
With the help of an interpreter, I learned her story. Roya was thirteen years old, the same age as my youngest daughter. But her life could not have been in starker contrast to that of my San Francisco high schooler and her girlfriends. Roya never had time for sports, or for school. She was born into a poor family living on the outskirts of Kabul. Her father was a street vendor; her mother raised five children and baked sweets for him to sell.
One day, while her father was out selling candies, Roya and her two sisters were trudging home carrying buckets of water. Suddenly, they heard a terrifying whir and then there was an explosion. Something terrible had dropped from the sky, tearing their house apart and sending the body parts of their mother and two brothers flying through the air.
The Americans must have thought Roya’s home was part of a nearby Taliban housing compound. In the cold vernacular of military-speak, her family had become “collateral damage” in America’s war on terror.
When Roya’s father came home, he carefully collected all the bits and pieces of his pulverized family that he could find, buried them immediately according to Islamic tradition, and then sank into a severe state of shock.
Roya became the head of her household. She bundled up her surviving sisters, grabbed her father, and fled. With no money or provisions, they trekked through the Hindu Kush, across the Khyber Pass, and into Pakistan.
In Peshawar, the family barely survived on the one dollar a day the girls made from begging. Roya took me to their one-room adobe hut to meet her father. A tall, strong man with the calloused hands of a hard worker, he no longer works. He doesn’t even walk or talk. He just sits and stares into space. “Once in a while he smiles,” Roya whispered.
Inside Afghanistan, I saw more lives destroyed by U.S. bombs. Some bombs hit the right target but caused horrific collateral damage. Some bombs hit the wrong target because of human error, machine malfunction, or faulty information.
In one village, the Americans thought a wedding party was a Taliban gathering. One minute, forty-three relatives were joyously celebrating; the next minute, their appendages were hanging off the limbs of trees.
Forty villagers were killed in another small town in the middle of the night. Their crime? They lived near the caves of Tora Bora, where Osama bin Laden was presumed to be hiding. The U.S. news media reported the dead as Taliban militants. But the woman I met—who had just lost her husband and four children, as well as both her legs—had never heard of al-Qaeda, America, or George Bush. Bleeding profusely, she was praying that she would die. Surviving as a crippled widow with no income and no family was too much to bear.
Whales and other marine mammals rely on their hearing for life’s most basic functions, such as orientation and communication. Sound is how they find food, find friends, find a mate, and find their way through the world every day. So when a sound thousands of times more powerful than a jet engine fills their ears, the results can be devastating—and even deadly.
This is the reality that whales and other marine mammals face because of human-caused noise in the ocean, whether it’s the sound of air-guns used in oil exploration or subs and ships emitting sonar. Man-made sound waves can drown out the noises that marine mammals rely on for their very survival, causing serious injury and even death.
If you’ve ever seen a submarine movie, you probably came away with a basic understanding of how sonar works. Active sonar systems produce intense sound waves that sweep the ocean like a floodlight, revealing objects in their path.
Some systems operate at more than 235 decibels, producing sound waves that can travel across tens or even hundreds of miles of ocean. During testing off the California coast, noise from the Navy’s main low-frequency sonar system was detected across the breadth of the northern Pacific Ocean.
By the Navy’s own estimates, even 300 miles from the source, these sonic waves can retain an intensity of 140 decibels—a hundred times more intense than the level known to alter the behavior of large whales.
The Navy’s most widely used sonar systems operate in the mid-frequency range. Evidence of the danger caused by these systems surfaced dramatically in 2000, when whales of four different species stranded themselves on beaches in the Bahamas. Although the Navy initially denied responsibility, the government’s investigation established that mid-frequency sonar caused the strandings.
After the incident, the area’s population of Cuvier’s beaked whales nearly disappeared, leading researchers to conclude that they either abandoned their habitat or died at sea. Similar mass strandings have occurred in the Canary Islands, Greece, Madeira Island, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Hawaii, and other sites around the globe.
Many of these beached whales have suffered physical trauma, including bleeding around the brain, ears, and other tissues and large bubbles in their organs. These symptoms are akin to a severe case of “the bends”—the illness that can kill scuba divers who surface quickly from deep water. Scientists believe that the mid-frequency sonar blasts may drive certain whales to change their dive patterns in ways their bodies cannot handle, causing debilitating and even fatal injuries.
Stranded whales are only the most visible symptom of a problem affecting much larger numbers of marine life.
In 2014, the Navy announced a five-year sonar-training plan that could threaten entire populations of marine wildlife off the East Coast, Southern California, Hawaii, and the Gulf Coast. The Navy estimates the increased sonar training will significantly harm marine mammals more than 10 million times off the U.S. coast alone. Navy ships will also conduct torpedo tests, bombing exercises, and underwater explosions—some 1.1 million events overall; an average of one detonation every two minutes for five years.
As a direct result, nearly 1,000 marine mammals could die. There could be more than 13,000 serious injuries—including permanent hearing loss and lung damage. And that’s according to the Navy’s own numbers.
Naval sonar has been shown to disrupt feeding and other vital behavior and to cause a wide range of species to panic and flee. Scientists are concerned about the cumulative effect of all of these impacts on marine animals.
May–June 2015—Six large whales (humpbacks and grays) wash up on California’s beaches from Santa Cruz to San Francisco over a two-month period. All show signs of muscle hemorrhaging and bleeding of the brain—possible signs of harmful sonar exposure. The U.S. Navy declined to provide data on sonar drills along the coast.
April 2014—Seven Cuvier’s beaked whales began stranding along the southern coast of Crete as the U.S., Greek, and other naval vessels engage in Operation Noble Dina war games offshore.
July 2011—Seventy pilot whales are driven onto Scottish shores after Britain’s Royal Navy explode four undersea bombs at Cape Wrath, Europe’s largest live-bombing range—nineteen died.
May–June 2008—A mass stranding of approximately 100 melon-headed whales off northwest Madagascar was triggered by a multi-beam echo-sounder system operated by a survey vessel contracted by ExxonMobil.
January 2006—At least four beaked whales strand in the Gulf of Almeria, Spain, while sonar exercises take place offshore.
January 2005—At least thirty-four whales of three species strand along the Outer Banks of North Carolina as Navy sonar training goes on offshore.
July 2004—Four beaked whales strand during naval exercises near the Canary Islands.
July 2004—Approximately 200 melon-headed whales crowd into the shallow waters of Hanalei Bay in Hawaii as a large Navy sonar exercise takes place nearby. Rescuers succeed in directing all but one of the whales back out to sea.
June 2004—As many as six beaked whales strand during a Navy sonar-training exercise off Alaska.
May 2003—As many as eleven harbor porpoises beach along the shores of the Haro Strait, Washington State, as the USS Shoup tests its mid-frequency sonar system.
September 2002—At least fourteen beaked whales from three different species strand in the Canary Islands during an antisubmarine warfare exercise in the area. Four additional beaked whales strand over the next several days.
May 2000—Three beaked whales strand on the beaches of Portugal’s Madeira Island during NATO naval exercises.
March 2000—Seventeen cetaceans, including fourteen beaked whales, beach themselves and die during Navy sonar exercises in the waters off Bermuda.
October 1999—Four beaked whales strand in the U.S. Virgin Islands during Navy maneuvers offshore.
October 1997—At least nine Cuvier’s beaked whales strand in the Ionian Sea, with military activity reported in the area.
May 1996—Twelve Cuvier’s beaked whales strand on the west coast of Greece as NATO ships sweep the area with low- and mid-frequency active sonar.
October 1989—At least twenty whales of three species strand during naval exercises near the Canary Islands.
December 1991—Two Cuvier’s beaked whales strand during naval exercises near the Canary Islands.
In 2013, the Navy revealed that live munitions training—scheduled to take place from 2014 to 2019—was expected to kill 186 whales and dolphins off the East Coast and 155 off Hawaii and Southern California. There could be 11,267 serious injuries and 1.89 million minor injuries (such as temporary hearing loss) off the East Coast alone, while exercises in the waters off Hawaii and Southern California could cause 2,039 serious injuries and 1.86 million temporary injuries.
On September 15, 2015, the NRDC and other environmental groups announced the Navy had agreed to limit its use of sonar and explosives to avoid harming whales, dolphins, and other marine mammals. The agreement limits or bans the use of mid-frequency active sonar and explosives in specified areas around the Hawaiian Islands and Southern California.