Syria’s oil heartland poisoned by decades of war, neglect, and inaction

The first thing that strikes you about the desert of eastern Syria is the vast still landscape: its silence, the unrelenting heat, and dry hot gusts of wind. The journey to Deir Az Zor feels like travelling back in time, with few markers of modernity evident as you look out from the road.

But then a vast, shimmering body of sludge emerges, a black scar through the beige desert. The smell is a thick, chemical tang of petroleum that coats the back of your throat. It looks almost beautiful, until you remember – it is a river of death.
The province – located in Syria’s far east and separated from the country’s populous and fertile west by miles of desert – has long been on the margins of the Syrian state, neglected for decades even before the war.

Today, that lack of governance is evident in broken bridges, gutted villages and oilfields left to rot. Few journalists make the trip due to the drive from Damascus. It can take up to half a day – through a few checkpoints and stretches of empty road where security is never guaranteed – and journeys should be complete before it gets dark.
At the decades-old pumps that pull the oil from the ground, we found a few guards seeking refuge from the heat in their tarp-lined security post. They approached us with rifles slung casually across their shoulders, one riding a gleaming Chinese-built motorcycle, the black logo of ISIL (ISIS) emblazoned on the headlight.

One of the men laughs when I point it out.

“We bought it like that,” he says with a shrug. “No one bothered to scrape it off.” It’s a chilling reminder that the ghosts of the recent past remain etched not just in memory but into the machinery of daily life.

Mohammed al-Touma, one of the safety engineers at the pump, steered things back to the crisis at hand.

“It kills the birds instantly,” he said, as he approached to tell us about the black, hazardous sludge that we had seen. “No one cares, please tell the world about this toxic, radioactive waste.”

The oilfield’s workers had left between 2012 and 2013, when ISIL began infiltrating into Deir Az Zor before fully taking over the province in 2014.

The workers returned once the group had been defeated in the area in 2017, only to find this expanding river of oil residue no longer being pumped back into the oil table deep underground. Nothing has changed since then, even after the fall of President Bashar al-Assad in December and the end of Syria’s war.

The new Syrian government faces security and governance challenges across the country, as it attempts to turn the page after 13 years of conflict. Fighting has periodically taken place involving government forces and local militias, leading to hundreds of deaths, and Israel continues to bomb the country and seize more territory.

And with reconstruction needed across the country, this oilfield in Deir Az Zor is not at the top of the government’s priority list.