After quake, Syria northern coast ravaged by wildfires

At 72, Syrian farmer Izzadin Zuhaira has survived conflict, displacement and a devastating earthquake in February.

However the forest fires razing his dwelling province of Latakia this week, turning his beloved orchards to ash, have been the worst he had seen.

“I’ve by no means seen any climate like this,” Zuhaira stated.

“The soil and the timber have been so impacted by the warmth that they lit up rapidly.”

The retired civil servant had been dwelling off the harvests of about 700 olive, pomegranate and walnut timber, however all of those have been destroyed by the spreading hearth.

His modest one-storey farmhouse, already broken by years of conflict, was additional cracked by the February earthquake, which left greater than 5000 lifeless in Syria and hit Latakia laborious.

“After the quake, the fires got here and completed it off,” Zuhaira advised Reuters.

“It left us with nothing.”

Like different international locations across the Mediterranean, Syria has been hit laborious by wildfires this month, supercharged by robust winds and searing temperatures.

Firefighters had struggled to place them out in Homs and Hama in mid-July, and the fires in Latakia raged for 5 days earlier than rescuers may management them, Syria’s agriculture minister Mohammad Hassaan Qatna stated on Saturday.

“There have been a number of locations, far-off,” Qatna advised Reuters throughout a tour of the world.

“The pace of the wind was an element within the extreme unfold of the fires.”

Different challenges for the firefighters included poor telecoms protection within the north and the procurement of fireproof fits or spare components for extinguishing tools, he stated.

Syria’s 12-year battle, together with Western sanctions, a forex squeeze linked to neighbouring Lebanon’s financial disaster and the federal government’s lack of its northeastern oil-producing territories have triggered a monetary meltdown.

On Saturday, firefighters may very well be seen pumping water from a fireplace truck to extinguish flames on a wooded slope in Latakia.

The ministry didn’t have a ultimate determine but of how far the injury had unfold, however Qatna stated the area’s pine forests have been badly hit.

“Pine is like coal for these fires,” he stated.

Syria has been severely impacted by local weather change lately, together with rising temperatures and erratic rainfall which have led to forest fires and poor harvests.

Mud storms, desertification and land loss had been threatening farmers’ livelihoods for years, stated Suhair Zakkout, spokeswoman for the Worldwide Committee of the Purple Cross in Syria.

“Syrians have been already particularly weak due to the impacts of greater than 12 years of battle, which makes it even tougher for them to take care of the impacts of local weather change,” she advised Reuters.