Seeds against bombs: Scenes from Syria’s agricultural resistance and revival

QAMISHLI/ALEPPO/BEIRUT — Already this past April, the signs of catastrophic drought and crop failures to come were looming in the flat, yellow-tinged landscape of northeastern Syria. The drive along the straight, dusty road leading from Qamishli to Amuda was a journey over cracked earth. 

Off in the distance, a small rectangle of greenery stood out in the parched landscape: the Nawa project. Established outside the Hasakah province town of Amuda after the Assad regime fell last December, the farm is a part of efforts across the country that share a goal both simple and revolutionary: to revive Syria’s lost heritage and treasure, its endemic fruits and vegetables

The name Nawa means “pit,” “kernel” or “seed” in Arabic—a nucleus from which growth begins. “We established this project to grow organic, heirloom vegetables and reproduce their seeds, so that we can distribute and spread them across the area,” Khunafa Shamo, one of the project’s co-founders, told Syria Direct. 

Members of the Nawa organic agriculture project harvest plants from the project’s crops in Amuda, northeastern Syria, 10/5/2025 (Philippe Pernot/Syria Direct)

“Because of the war and sanctions, it grew increasingly difficult to find Syrian local seeds to plant. Most farmers now rely on industrial ones, but they are not as resistant to climate warming and drought, nor are they as healthy—they create a dependency,” Shamo explained. 

Unknown to many, most fruits and vegetables found in Syrian market stalls are not local varieties. In northeastern Syria, seeds available to farmers largely come from Turkey, China, and even the United States (US) or Latin America. 

Engineered to resist specific illnesses and yield impressive quantities, they must be bought anew every year. Paired with chemical fertilizers and pesticides, the cost is a huge burden for impoverished farmers. Shamo wants to change that. 

Fruit and vegetable stalls in Raqqa city, northeastern Syria, 9/4/2025 (Philippe Pernot/Syria Direct)

“We reproduce seeds and grow seedlings on two farms in Rojava [the Kurdish-majority, de facto autonomous regions of northeastern Syria], then distribute them for free to other farmers,” she explained. “Our aim is to create a whole network, spanning all over Syria.”

Shamo, and seed farmers in her network, say native varieties are not only more resistant to extreme weather events like this year’s historic drought, but can help restore Syria’s biodiversity and social fabric as the country emerges from nearly 14 years of conflict. 

Hours away to the southwest, Syria Direct visited the other Nawa farm, established outside Raqqa. The city, still largely destroyed following the 2017 battle against the Islamic State (IS), is now run by the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) amid growing tensions with the area’s mostly Arab inhabitants. 

On the farm—a hectare of land next to a family home—young native fruits, vegetables and herbs are putting down new roots. When Syria Direct visited in April, zaatar (thyme) grew beside local tomatoes, eggplants, lettuce and molokhia (mallow). 

“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,” Abdelkader Ismail al-Fares, the agronomist at the head of the initiative, told Syria Direct. 

Abdelkader Ismail al-Fares, agronomist and co-founder of the Nawa initiative, in Raqqa, 8/4/2025 (Philippe Pernot/Syria Direct)

“At the time of the [self-declared IS] caliphate, 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 proudly, holding a bunch of green khobeizeh (another kind of wild mallow) in his hands.

The seeds growing at both Nawa farms travelled a long way before sprouting in the soil of northeastern Syria. But after years spent displaced alongside farmers, safeguarded far from home and smuggled over borders and into besieged areas, they are finally taking root. 

The damaged logo of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) in Tel Hadya, in Aleppo’s southern countryside, 27/6/2025 (Philippe Pernot/Syria Direct)

Syria’s lost seeds

In the wake of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iraq’s seed bank was looted. Thousands of heirloom seeds were lost, wiping out centuries of agricultural heritage and valuable genetic diversity. A decade later, Syria’s seed bank sidestepped a similar fate. 

When the 2011 revolution began, a wealth of Syrian seeds were stored at the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), an international research center based in Tel Hadya, south of Aleppo city. Opened in 1977 under Hafez al-Assad, the center’s goal was to develop seeds adapted to semi-arid climates, such as Syria’s, and improve food security around the world. 

It also became the place where the Assad regime experimented with its authoritarian agricultural policies. New hybrid seeds, developed at the center to boost productivity and national sovereignty, became part of a system under which farmers were told what to grow, what production methods to use and how much to sell their crops for. 

“Back in Assad’s times, we could only plant specific types of crops, like wheat, and sell it for a specific price to the state. [We] needed permits to develop anything else,” Ibrahim al-Youssef, an organic seed farmer in the southern Aleppo countryside village of Zarbah, told Syria Direct. He was displaced from his village during the war, and returned after the Assad regime fell in December 2024.

When Syria’s 2011 revolution spiraled into civil war, the front lines drew ever closer to ICARDA’s offices—just a 20-minute drive from al-Youssef’s fields. Ultimately, the center was taken over by armed opposition groups in 2012 and evacuated in 2015.

By then, ICARDA employees had managed to send copies of 80 percent of the 170,000 seed varieties at the center to Norway’s Svalbard “doomsday” vault: an Arctic seed bank designed to withstand nuclear war and provide seed only for the most catastrophic situations. 

Ibrahim al-Youssef shows seeds grown on his farm in Zarbah, southern Aleppo, 27/6/2025 (Philippe Pernot/Syria Direct)

But while some seeds were saved, others were lost. Over the war years that followed, thousands of Syrian farmers were displaced, leaving farms abandoned and looted by armed actors. Some lost seeds their families had been reproducing for generations. 

Others carried seeds with them—spiriting them across frontlines, borders and, in some cases, all the way to Europe. They would have an important role to play in the years to come. 

Seeds of solidarity

In Europe, an extensive network of seed banks and collectives helped safeguard Syrian seeds far from home.

“We were able to restore lost species after keeping them alive here at our farms, despite very different climatic conditions,” a Dutch member of a Longo Maï agricultural collective in southern France, who goes by Ieke, told Syria Direct by phone. 

Longo Maï is a network of ten autonomous cooperatives with 200 members scattered across Europe. For more than half a century, they have been spreading organic farming techniques and agroecology—a holistic approach to food systems that combines sustainable practices with care for the environment and local communities—while connecting with similar initiatives abroad.

For years, Ieke’s collective had been farming native Middle Eastern seeds in northern Germany, trying to keep them alive. “They were more dead than alive because of the German weather,” she said, laughing. 

When the war began, the group scrambled to provide support by retrieving Syrian heirloom seeds that had found their way to France, Germany and the Netherlands—in national seed banks or in the hands of some of the thousands of refugees flowing into the continent. Alongside other gardeners and farmers, the network multiplied these seeds before sending them back to their original countries.

The plant nursery at Juzuruna Buzuruna’s agroecological farm in Saadnayel, in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, 4/10/2024 (Philippe Pernot/Syria Direct)

Some of the Syrian seeds Longo Maï saved found their way back closer to home, to Buzuruna Juzuruna, an organic farm in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley established in 2016 by a group of French, Syrian and Lebanese farmers. Its name, meaning “our seeds, our roots,” symbolized its goal: to revive and steward traditional seeds and plant varieties. 

Among Buzuruna Juzuruna’s co-founders was Walid al-Youssef, seed farmer Ibrahim al-Youssef’s brother. In the years after the brothers fled Syria in 2013, both worked at the farm, building their knowledge of agroecology and seed farming. 

In a “seed library” built into a mudbrick farmhouse, the Buzuruna Juzuruna team painstakingly gathered more than 1,000 seed types from across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. The collection reflects the farm’s close ties with like-minded seed banks and farmers in Palestine, Iraq, Tunisia, France, Germany and beyond—including Longo Maï.

Walid al-Youssef stands in Buzuruna Juzuruna’s seed library in Saadnayel, Lebanon, 3/11/2024 (Philippe Pernot/Syria Direct)

“The idea behind our farm has always been self-sufficiency and food sovereignty in the event of a disaster: we’ve been working tirelessly for eight years to get to this point,” Walid al-Youssef told Syria Direct during a visit in November 2024.  

‘A tool of resistance’

As the war in Syria dragged on, hunger and siege became hallmarks of the conflict. In Zabadani, Yarmouk, Idlib, the green Ghouta suburbs of Damascus and beyond, opposition-controlled areas were surrounded by Assad’s army and allied militias, which imposed severe blockades that prevented inhabitants from bringing in the most basic supplies. 

“During the war, seeds became a tool of resistance against siege and hunger, a political tool for food sovereignty,” Ibrahim al-Youssef explained. 

Under siege, urban farming—from rooftop gardens to homegrown mushrooms—was a way to survive. Smuggled seeds became another way to resist, and a network was established to bring these precious goods to besieged farmers.

“Some farmers’ female relatives, who could travel with less danger than men, smuggled them back in [from Lebanon] by hiding them in their clothes and paying bribes at Syrian army checkpoints,” the farmer recounted. “Smuggling seeds in bags of zaatar [spice blends] or in their clothing, they were sometimes able to break the siege.”

‘For the future of our country’

The fall of Assad one year ago meant that Ibrahim al-Youssef could return to his land. No longer a refugee, he returned to his small, rural village near Aleppo city on December 9, 2024, carrying with him all he learned in exile about seed reproduction and agroecology. 

“I learned everything from them, how to space my plants, how to irrigate them with drip irrigation, how to reproduce seeds generation after generation—and I wanted to bring all of that back to Syria,” he told Syria Direct.

Today, in his small rural village near Aleppo, Ibrahim has set up an heirloom, organic seed project on five dunams, growing all sorts of vegetables, herbs and aromatic plants. His brother Walid joined him there over the summer after returning from Lebanon. 

Together, the brothers grow the plants until they fully mature, collect their seeds and distribute them free of cost to neighbors and other farmers, only keeping what they need for their own consumption. Every season, they will repeat the same cycle, selecting the sturdiest seeds. It is a process that farmers in Syria, and around the world, have practiced for thousands of years.

Ibrahim al-Youssef examines his stored seeds in Zarbah, south Aleppo countryside, 27/06/2025 (Philippe Pernot/Syria Direct)

“A hundred years ago, our grandparents used to save seeds from their own crops and replant them the next season, generation after generation. This concept has always existed—we’re just reviving it. It’s our way of responding to crisis and heading towards food sovereignty,” Ibrahim al-Youssef explained.

The day Syria Direct visited this past June, a carefully labeled collection of seeds sat in jars in the farm’s garage, where a Syrian flag with three stars—the symbol of the revolution—hung above the shelves.

In the al-Youssef brothers’ fields and at the Nawa project farms in the northeast, the descendents of seeds that Longo Maï saved in Europe and Buzuruna Juzuruna replanted in Lebanon are spurring the recovery of Syria’s agriculture.

Seed by seed, a network of organic farmers is expanding across the country, from the coast to the northeast. “Our goal is not profit, but to remediate the land,” Shamo said in Amuda, “to preserve and expand its biodiversity for the future of our country.” 

Additional reporting by Yaser Shahrour, Mohammad al-Khalil and Rayanne Tawil. 

Parts of this reporting were funded by the Environmental Journalism Stipend of the French Association of Journalists and Writers for the Environment (JNE) and Dauphine University-PSL with support of the Madeleine Foundation.