The Green Frontline

The first tree Ahmed Abu Mariam planted was for his daughter. The soil was dry that year, cracked from war and the weight of grief, but he dug deep anyway, not just for roots, but for hope.

"I asked God to help me plant more," he said. "Not one or two. Millions."

The silence of the hills above Latakia, once carpeted with dense forests of cedar and aromatic bay laurel, today is louder than the wind. Birds that once called this place home are often gone. Fires have scorched the undergrowth. And the trees – many of them centuries old – have vanished, cut down or burned in the war by desperate people for fuel and profit, and by an increasingly hot and dry climate. What remains is a widening ecological void that Mariam has tried for years to resist.

A self-described lover of history and soil, 54-year-old Abu Mariam has spent decades planting trees and documenting the disappearance of Syria’s coastal forests. "These forests are older than the war. Older than all of us," he said. "Some of them are rooted in mythology, in civilisations that go back 12,000 years."

In March 2025, sectarian killings and kidnappings shattered mixed and Alawite communities (a Muslim minority sect) along the coast, compounding a climate of fear that the new transitional government has failed to dispel. Months later, as heat and drought primed the mountains to burn, the jihadist faction Saraya Ansar al-Sunna claimed it torched the Qastal forests, framing arson as punishment of Alawites, a collective blame grafted from military campaigns waged by the Al-Assad regime that fell in December 2024. 

Whether every blaze began with a match, with negligence, or with criminal logging, the effect was the same: Alawites remained targets and fire became both a weapon and a message.

Others call it revenge, citing the war years, when regime-aligned shabiha were accused by opponents of looting, torture and burning rebel-held lands; today’s flames are supposed to balance past fires. Still, this ‘payback’ does not seem to explain the landscape. 

In Syria, forest loss has been staggering. Over the past decade, the country has lost nearly one-fifth of its tree cover, with coastal strongholds like Latakia and Idlib stripped bare by logging, charcoal production, and unchecked militia activity. The destruction accelerated in 2025, when wildfires tore through Latakia’s hills and farmland, burning more than 12,000 hectares of forest in a matter of weeks, roughly 2.5 per cent of Syria’s remaining cover. 

The value of a tree

In a collapsed economy, timber smugglers, protection rackets and desperate families all find profit in ash. Forests that were once guarded by law and custom are now marketable.

Abu Mariam insists the story is also simpler, closer to the ground. "A tree gives breath," he said. "We suffocate without it." Two decades ago, he created Hawakeer, "small gardens," a volunteer initiative to put native trees back into emptied slopes. Hawakeer’s goal: one million trees, is audacious by any measure. The method involves planting what can survive and support the local villages. Bay laurel for leaf and fruit oils used in soaps and perfumes. Carob and sumac for the kitchen and market. Mulberry and jujube for shade and silk. He says Hawakeer has set more than 10,000 laurels in the ground to date, often with children and neighbourhood volunteers. Girls and women lead much of the organising, from scheduling to watering lines, because, he says, "they hold the house and the hill at the same time.

Threats have followed the planting. Abu Mariam counts three: a 2014 confrontation in Jabal al-Sha‘ra while he filmed men stripping laurels; gunfire near Slinfeh’s fir and cedar reserve after he and friends stumbled onto fresh charcoal pits; and a tense encounter in Rabia with antiquities thieves who mistook him for a police informant. "They cut trees and people," he said, explaining that he went home that day and wrote three lines at the bottom of his field notebook: "Planting isn’t charity. It’s resistance. Start again."

What Grows After Fire

If violence is the spark, drought is the fuse. Syria has endured its driest stretch in decades, a prolonged period of failed rains that has severely reduced the flow of rivers and springs. In these conditions, fire behaves faster and more erratically, which complicates the tracing of a source. July’s blazes in northern rural Latakia ran across steep, mine-laced terrain and through villages where water trucks are already a luxury. By the time the flames were contained, thousands of hectares of forest and farmland were blackened, and families were driven once more from their homes.

Yet these days, every contact with the forest is fraught with danger. Another environmentalist, Mudar Salimeh, who also works with Hawakeer, set out this spring for the Slinfeh Cedar and Fir Reserve to document the short-blooming lily Fritillaria amana, which flowers only in mid-April. After the civil war, Syria remains an under-researched territory for environmentalists. Salimeh was blocked by locals from entering the forest, given the presence of foreign fighters and armed herders firing at "anything that moves," he told Fair Planet. Following the March massacres of the Alawite minority, the security situation remains deeply worrying for the inhabitants of the hills, with cases of extrajudicial killings and kidnappings still occurring.

The Mediterranean basin – one of the world’s fastest-warming hotspots – has been burning from Algeria to Greece and Lebanon. Droughts have been turning water into leverage; migration becomes policy; fire writes a different kind of ceasefire into the land. 

In Israel, wildfire has been used as a weapon in conflicts with Hamas and Hezbollah. In Syria, the boundaries between arson and accident are often difficult to trace. Poverty, local grievances, and basic market pressures all play a role: restaurants rely on wood, cafés depend on charcoal, and smugglers seek routes through wooded areas. When the price of laurel oil exceeds that of olive oil, and the cost of fuel rises faster than wages, forests are increasingly treated as economic resources rather than cultural heritage.

Yet heritage is what Abu Mariam is trying to salvage. He talks about laurel as if it were a relative: evergreen, aromatic, stubborn. He remembers elders who made real soap, not the cheap bars now imported, and neighbours who carved instruments from local wood. He can still describe a clearing where godar trees dropped resin like amber and a path lined with wild thyme that smelled strongest after rain. "All gone," he said, "but I can still see it."

Hawakeer is paused for now. Security, mobility and money have tightened around Latakia. He carries GPS pins and photos of burn scars he would like experts to verify when he can move again. The larger plan remains community nurseries, seed collection mapped and shared, as well as household soap rooms and small cosmetics labs to maintain value in the village. Furthermore, he seeks partners willing to contribute to the reforestation of ancient forests, without needing to obtain permission from armed groups.

The question is not whether the fires will come again. They will. It is rather whether what grows afterwards will belong to the people who stayed.

On a ridge above Latakia, there are laurel seedlings taking hold in a seam of soil. Mariam presses a palm against the ground and listens as if to a chest for breath.

"Syria’s forests are our memory," he said. "If we forget them, we forget ourselves."

Images by Robert Bociaga.