A dusty wind swept through the streets of al-Shaddadah, in northeast Syria, its rundown roads dotted with military checkpoints and its buildings in a state of disrepair.
At the town’s public school, a curious scene unfolded before the eyes of the schoolchildren: some 50 women, many of whom were wearing full veils to protect themselves from the scorching sun, were planting pistachio seeds in bags of potting soil scattered around the playground.
“These plants will be distributed to the volunteers and their families so that they can grow them and earn an income from them. This is the first environmental project I've ever heard of in the history of the town,” Nada al-Helou, school principal and member of The Green Tress, told The New Arab.
The environmental NGO, which is active in all of northeast Syria (NES), launched the Sheddadeh project in cooperation with the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES), which controls the area.
Their aim: to provide economic support for families in this impoverished Arab region, to reverse desertification, but also to fight against the Islamic State group (IS/ISIS).
In al-Sheddadeh, as in other regions of northeastern and central Syria, rumours of an IS comeback are swelling. The town was one of its strongholds between 2013 and 2016, when it fell to the Kurdish-majority Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
The presence of IS sleeper cells is no longer a secret, and Salafist ideology seems to be enjoying a resurgence in popularity.
“IS has once again become a threat, especially since the fall of the Assad regime: it is taking advantage of the security vacuum, economic deterioration and abandoned weapons stockpiles to recruit and reconstitute itself,” explains Dr Nanar Hawash, analyst at the International Crisis Group.
Pistachio trees against IS
The primary cause of its success: the lack of economic opportunities. “IS, but also all the armed groups in the region, provide people with a salary. To combat them, the social conditions must change,” the expert added.
In Syria, after 14 years of civil war, the average salary for civil servants is equivalent to around $30 per month. In the private sector, incomes typically rise to a few hundred dollars at most.
“Many young people are joining armed groups to find a salary,” Nada al-Helou, the school principal, told The New Arab. She explained that al-Sheddadeh is an agricultural region which used to be fertile, but the water wells have dried up, and the economic situation has deteriorated.
It's an open secret that many of the region's inhabitants worked with IS, whether out of conviction or necessity. Among the projects’ female volunteers, some have lost their husbands or sons in the war — they are either dead or imprisoned in prisons for former IS fighters.
The others remain traumatised by what they have experienced. “Daesh [the Arabic acronym for IS] imprisoned my son and my husband, forbade me to wear even the normal hijab. They wanted to explain to us what Islam is, as if we weren't Muslims,” Nada el-Helou remembered bitterly.
For her, planting these pistachio trees means not only promoting the region's biodiversity but also changing the attitudes of new generations and encouraging women.
“Children hardly ever learn about the environment in school, so I think it's important for my son to see this tree grow and grow with him,” she said.
“And we've fought hard to get women to leave their homes and take part in the project here, to prove that they can farm away from the supervision of men,” the director explained.
In this way, she believes, the fight against patriarchy can be connected to environmental protection.
Raqqa and the scars of the Caliphate
As we move deeper into the vast arid regions south of al-Sheddadeh, IS's sphere of influence also grows.
The New Arab was unable to visit Deir ez-Zor because of the risk of kidnapping by sleeper cells.
And in Raqqa, a major Arab city in northeastern Syria and former capital of the Islamic State caliphate between 2014 and 2017, the situation is visibly tense.
Many buildings are still in ruins, the city suffers from a depressed economic situation, a lack of electricity and high pollution linked to the low-grade fuel oil used for electric generators and vehicles.
The thousand-year-old city had been 80% destroyed during violent fighting between the SDF, backed by the international coalition, and IS fighters. The siege lasted four months, between June and October 2017, and left almost 4,000 dead, half of them civilians caught in the fighting.
Since then, the Kurdish authorities have been working to rebuild this scarred Arab town, despite the hostility of some of the inhabitants, who denounce a repressive occupation.
“The SDF are imprisoning journalists and political opponents while claiming to be fighting against Daesh, and the infrastructure is still dilapidated,” a local activist, nicknamed Omar, who wished to remain anonymous out of security reasons, criticised.
“The Autonomous Administration [of Northeast Syria] here is corrupt, and since the fall of Assad's regime, the situation has been deteriorating visibly. Thefts now take place in broad daylight, and we're witnessing a strong comeback of Salafism. It's really worrying,” a Kurdish resident of Raqqa, who works for a mine-clearing NGO and wishes to remain anonymous for his own safety, also told The New Arab.
“If it goes on like this, the SDF could lose control of the city within a few months, and I'd be forced to leave too, as I've already received death threats on my car reading: 'We'll come for you, Kurd'.”
Social and security tensions are growing in Raqqa, where clashes have already pitted Arab residents against Kurdish forces on several occasions, notably when Bashar al-Assad fell on December 8.
Making the region livable
These grievances against the Kurdish authorities are driving some of the inhabitants of Raqqa and the surrounding area to support conservative political Islam, such as that advocated by the new Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) government in place in Damascus since the fall of the Assad regime, or even to join the ranks of IS.
“It's a logical consequence of a feeling of exclusion and marginalisation by what people see as a foreign entity [the Kurdish-led DAANES is supported by the USA and France],” confirms Dr Nanar Hawash. To make the city and its surroundings more livable, environmental projects are flourishing and proposing ways to address the issue.
Raqqa's environmental authority, for example, has set up a plant nursery to support farmers and reforest the city's green spaces, including the famous al-Naim traffic circle, the site of public executions under IS.
The New Arab met Awash Abdel Mohammad, one of the nursery's employees, as she carried young rose bushes in a wheelbarrow.
“I work here out of economic necessity. I'm a widow with eight children to support. I earn 1,075,000 Syrian pounds a month [around 160 euros], that's barely enough to survive,” sighs this displaced Aleppo woman who has lived in Raqqa since the city's liberation eight years ago.
“But I think it's an important job: we work together, men and women, to reforest and embellish the city. If IS came back, we wouldn't be able to do this anymore,” she added.
The authorities are growing hundreds of plants, some endemic and others exotic, to enhance Raqqa's biodiversity.
“After the war, the environment and the city were devastated, the infrastructure in ruins, the forests destroyed... We're trying to bring back local plants and test what new species might adapt here,” Aref Muslim, agronomist and co-chairman of the city's environmental authority, explained.
As in all DAANES departments, he shares the co-chairmanship with his agronomist colleague, Pusaina Mohammad. “This would be unthinkable under Daesh and even under the HTS government,” she said.
“As an environmental authority, we try to measure air pollution and enforce norms, tell polluting companies to move away from living areas, and create some awareness – but the task at hand is huge and the region has other priorities.”
Bringing back biodiversity and tolerance
In this region severely affected by decades of monocultures under the Assad regime, wars and droughts, private initiatives are also blossoming. The Nuwwa nursery, a heirloom seed project established in Hazima, a small town on the outskirts of Raqqa, is one of them.
“We started the project only a few months ago, our aim is to develop and then grow local seeds here, and finally distribute 100,000 of them to farmers throughout Syria,” Abdelkader Ismail al-Fares, the agronomist at the head of the initiative, told The New Arab.
Thanks to connections in Lebanon, he was able to import heirloom, organic seeds that had become unobtainable since the civil war from a seed bank in Germany.
Planted in a hectare of land next to his family home, young plants of traditional varieties of fruit, vegetables and herbs are now coming back to life. But the project isn't just about reviving biodiversity: it's also about strengthening social cohesion.
“We've created a network with hundreds of farmers from all over Syria. We send each other our seeds, we exchange information on WhatsApp, and we sometimes visit each other: Kurds, Arabs, Christians, no difference,” he explained proudly.
The aim is also to help their families make a better living from their land by no longer needing to buy pesticides or hybrid seeds, which are expensive and imported from Turkey, the US or even China.
“At the time, many young people joined IS simply to earn a wage, to be able to support themselves and their children. Thanks to projects like ours, they can work on their own land and have a source of income far from any form of extremism,” he added, holding a bunch of green Khobeizeh (wild mallow) in his hands.
Between the threat of IS’s comeback, the DAANES’ corruption, and a possible takeover by the new authorities under Ahmed al-Sharaa, the future of Raqqa and the region seems very precarious.
But the seeds bring hope for a peaceful future for Syria.
Philippe Pernot is a French-German photojournalist living in Beirut. Covering anarchist, environmentalist, and queer social movements, he is now the Lebanon correspondent for Frankfurter Rundschau and an editor for various international media
Follow him on X: @PhilippePernot7