The cracked earth of the bed of a dried-up watercourse in Eastern Ghouta. (Credit: Emmanuel Haddad/L'Orient-Le Jour)
Climbing plants rise out of plastic bottles in Mahmoud Soueidani's bleak gas cannister warehouse in Nawa, the most populous city in southern Syria's Daraa province. The 35-year-old farmer now spends most of his time in this dark space between crumbling walls, where the makeshift bits of greenery act as an existential reminder of a vocation ruined by the absence of rain this year.On the morning of July 5, he doesn't even have gas to sell. So, as he is often forced to do, he shuts the shop and walks across his dead land, parched and downhearted. Normally, he spends most of his days outside, presiding over the sprouting of his 380 dunums (about 38 hectares) of wheat, barley, lentils, and olive trees.But nothing grew on unirrigated land this winter, he explains, “and the land I was able to water produced about 100 kilograms per...
Climbing plants rise out of plastic bottles in Mahmoud Soueidani's bleak gas cannister warehouse in Nawa, the most populous city in southern Syria's Daraa province. The 35-year-old farmer now spends most of his time in this dark space between crumbling walls, where the makeshift bits of greenery act as an existential reminder of a vocation ruined by the absence of rain this year.On the morning of July 5, he doesn't even have gas to sell. So, as he is often forced to do, he shuts the shop and walks across his dead land, parched and downhearted. Normally, he spends most of his days outside, presiding over the sprouting of his 380 dunums (about 38 hectares) of wheat, barley, lentils, and olive trees.But nothing grew on unirrigated land this winter, he explains, “and the land I was able to water produced about 100 kilograms...
