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For the first time in recorded history, the Orontes River—syria’s ancient artery of sustenance, known in Arabic as Nahr al-Asi—has shriveled into a parched scar across the western landscape. Furthermore, its 571-kilometer course lies fractured into cracked earth and stagnant pools where once surged the waters of life. This unprecedented desiccation, unfolding amid the nation’s tentative post-war recovery, signals not only ecological collapse but a cascade of existential threats to food security and economic survival. In fact, the river that defies convention by flowing northward from Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley through Homs, Hama, and Idlib before reaching the turkish Mediterranean has irrigated Syria’s agricultural heartlands for millennia.
Its sudden betrayal reveals a deeper malaise: the convergence of climate upheaval, infrastructural decay, and geopolitical neglect that now threatens to unravel fragile threads of renewal. The crisis erupted into stark visibility earlier this month, when viral videos swept social media showing the riverbed’s barren expanse near Jisr al-Shughur and Hama—scenes of exposed boulders, withered reeds, and livestock grazing aimlessly where fish once darted. Fishermen, whose livelihoods once pulsed with the river’s rhythm, now mourn what one villager called “the death of an entire way of life. ” Production in the Ghab Plain has collapsed from 40 percent capacity to under 10. The immediate culprits are clear: rainfall in winter 2025, the lowest since 1956 at barely 30 percent of norms; depleted springs that once fed the river; and critically diminished reserves at the Rustan Dam, Syria’s linchpin for Orontes flow.
This marks a grim escalation from the river’s last severe ebb 54 years ago, when flows dipped perilously but never vanished entirely. At the epicenter lies agriculture, the Orontes’ most faithful ward. The river irrigates vast swaths of the central and western provinces—Hama’s orchards, Homs’ grain belts, Idlib’s vegetable fields—sustaining up to 70 percent of cultivation in some districts. Its abrupt halt has severed lifelines to irrigation canals, forcing farmers into desperate improvisation.
In rural Hama, some now resort to sewage effluent for watering crops, a perilous gamble that risks contaminating produce with pathogens and heavy metals, imperiling public health and export viability. The toll is immediate and arithmetic: yields of wheat, barley, cotton, and summer vegetables have cratered by 50 to 70 percent in affected zones, as per farmer testimonies and early harvest data. With Syria’s arable land already halved by war and displacement, this drought deepens a pre-existing shortfall, pushing the nation toward 80 percent…