People in Syria’s southern Houran region have long turned to clan reconciliation processes to resolve thorny disputes. The practice increased after 2011, and peaked over the past three years, with residents choosing the clans over the courts with the encouragement of regime legal representatives.
Communities and local armed groups in Syria’s southern Suwayda and Daraa provinces are taking the fight against drug traffickers and smugglers into their own hands. With Damascus and Hezbollah profiting from the trade, they face an uphill battle.
Trees have fallen under the axe in Daraa and across Syria since the spring 2011 revolution, cut for wood to sell or use as an alternative to heating and cooking gas during war, siege and economic crises. Since 2020, however, logging has increased to include fruit-bearing trees on private farmland and within cities.
Syria’s fronts with Israel remain relatively quiet, while intensified Israeli strikes and mobilization by Iran-linked forces in the country leave the door open to increased escalation.
A landmark torture case brought against Syria by Canada and the Netherlands began at the UN’s highest court on Tuesday—with Damascus absent. While it is not a criminal case, torture survivors and family members of Syria’s disappeared say it marks another milestone in their long, slow fight for accountability.
As anti-Damascus protests in Suwayda move into a second week, they are developing and becoming more organized, while Druze religious leadership appears divided on what kind of change is needed.
Recent economic moves by Damascus impacted the cost of most basic goods and services, sparking a wave of protests in the country’s south and anger all the way to the coast.
Across Daraa province, groundwater is receding deeper into the earth. On top of climate factors like rising temperatures and fluctuating or delayed rainfall, human activity is taking a toll: Thousands of unlicensed wells have been drilled in recent years due to a lack of state oversight and a struggling public water network.
One month after the Pylos shipwreck, only 25 of 82 bodies recovered from the sea have been identified—a challenging process that requires DNA samples to be collected across multiple countries. In Syria, authorities have still not authorized DNA collection from relatives of the missing.
Syria's fertile Houran was once so productive it was called the "granary of Rome.” Today, farmers in southern Syria battle climate change and the economic fallout of war to make a living and preserve this traditional agriculture.
