Let me start with a disclaimer: I haven’t liked Martin O’Malley since I figured out who this Tommy Carcetti guy was (I was years late watching The Wire, sue me), and seeing the legacy of his term as Baltimore mayor engulf that city earlier this year didn’t improve my impression of him. But no matter how much Obvious Anagram Reince Priebus wants desperately to point and laugh at him for saying it, O’Malley is absolutely correct to draw a connection between climate change and ISIS.
ISIS came into being on the back of the US invasion of Iraq, but after largely being defeated there it got a huge boost out of the Syrian civil war, which it exploited first by sending Abu Mohammad al-Julani to Syria to form Jabhat al-Nusra and later by directly expanding its operations across the border and turning ISI into ISIS. The Syrian civil war was caused by a number of things, but there’s no question that one of its chief causes was the socio-economic stress placed on Syrian society by a severe drought the country suffered from 2006 through 2011. That drought hit small farmers hard, many of those small farmers stopped farming and migrated to the cities, and those cities became more crowded at a time when the country’s ability to feed its urban population was declining. Obviously it’s hard to blame one extreme weather event on climate change, but it’s pretty safe to say that an extended drought like Syria’s was at the very least exacerbated by climate change.
Currently, outside of its core Syria-Iraq zone, ISIS is arguably seeing its greatest success in Sinai (though it’s also been “successful,” at least if you’re going by body count, in Libya and, via its Boko Haram partners, in Nigeria), where its Sinai Province affiliate is really taking the fight to the Egyptian government. Sinai Province got its biggest boost out of the 2013 military coup that removed then-President Mohammed Morsi from office. But Morsi was only in office to begin with because of the 2011 protest movement that eventually forced then-President Hosni Mubarak from office. And that protest movement, like much of the “Arab Spring,” was partly caused by spikes in global food prices, brought on in part by, say it with me, climate change.
So climate deniers may not want to hear it, but O’Malley ain’t wrong. Climate change didn’t give birth to ISIS, but it certainly helped to create the conditions under which ISIS was able to revive itself and reach the position of strength it occupies today. Unfortunately this problem is only going to get worse unless we all stop laughing when folks like O’Malley say stuff like this, and start taking the problem of climate change seriously, because eventually these changes are going to stop contributing to the rise of this or that group of bad guys and start leading directly to things like inter-state water wars. You think Sinai Province is a drag? Imagine what it’s going to be like if Egyptian and Ethiopian squabbling over water flow on the Nile gets critical enough to turn violent. Or what could happen, post-ISIS, if Turkey, Syria, and Iraq get to seriously feuding over the Tigris and Euphrates. Or if India and Pakistan, both packing nukes, decide to go to war over water flow on the Indus River. You think there are serious humanitarian crises in places like Yemen and South Sudan? Wait until the water really starts to disappear.
This is the future we’re looking at unless something drastic happens to arrest our entirely self-inflicted slide into climate catastrophe. Instead of mocking Martin O’Malley for barely scratching the surface of the issue, we ought to be mocking the people who still deny that this climate business can have, and is having, a real impact on humanity.
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The Foreign Exchanges Companion 