In 2009, Qatar had proposed a pipeline to send its gas northwest via Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria to Turkey. According to Orenstein, Assad "refused to sign the plan" under pressure from "Russia, which did not want to see its position in European gas markets undermined."
Instead, Russia put its weight behind "an alternative Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline that would pump Iranian gas from the same field out via Syrian ports."
Then in 2011, the Arab Spring protests erupted. By July, Assad signed a preliminary agreement for a $10 billion Russia-backed Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline agreement.
Later that year, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Israel ramped up covert assistance to rebel factions in Syria to elicit the collapse of Assad's regime from within.
"The United States " supports the Qatari pipeline as a way to balance Iran and diversify Europe's gas supplies away from Russia," explained Orenstein in Foreign Affairs.
CollapseAssad's repression of his own people was exploited by foreign powers to fan the flames of this proxy war for black gold. But the popular discontent was amplified by deeper systemic factors.
In Syria, climate-induced droughts over the preceding decade had ravaged agriculture, forcing more than a million poor Sunni farmers to seek employment in the Alawite-dominated coastal cities.
Globally, climate-induced extreme weather had triggered a string of crop failures in major food basket regions, driving global food prices up. The price spikes made staple foods like bread too expensive for the poor majority in many Arab countries, Syria among them.
Climate change had a "catalytic effect" on civil unrest in Syria.
To compound matters, Syria's conventional oil production--which had underpinned the vast bulk of the state's revenues--had peaked in 1996. By 2011, state revenues were hemorrhaging, forcing Assad to slash food and fuel subsidies.
Climate change--and energy depletion--thus had what the Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences called a "catalytic effect" on civil unrest in Syria.
It continues to do so, and not just in Syria.
According to U.S. meteorologist Eric Holthaus, ISIS' rapid rise coincided with a period of unprecedented heat in Iraq from March to May 2014, recognized as the warmest on record. Recurrent droughts and heavy rainstorms have played havoc with Iraq's agriculture. Iraq's U.S.-backed Shiite-dominated government has largely failed to address these challenges, even as ISIS has moved quickly to exploit them, for instance by using dams as a weapon of war.
Between 2003 and 2009, according to the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) sponsored by NASA and the German Aerospace Centre, the Tigris-Euphrates basin--distributed predominantly between Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and western Iran--has lost groundwater faster than any other place in the world except northern India.
Yemen is also consuming water far faster than it can be replenished, an issue playing a key background role in driving local inter-tribal and sectarian conflicts.
In fact, every single Muslim-majority country experiencing civil unrest from rising Islamist violence is simultaneously experiencing resource shortages linked to food insecurity, reported one peer-reviewed study in the journal Sustainability.
The study noted mounting evidence that a lack of "access to critical resources, including food, energy, and water, can, in certain circumstances, lead to violent demonstrations."
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