Syria is facing one of the most severe environmental disasters in its modern history, as wildfires tear through the natural forests of the northern coast in Latakia — the country’s ecological lungs and home to nature reserves like al-Furnloq. Major fires have also broken out across the coastal mountain range, including in the Masyaf mountains north of Hama and the Idlib countryside, where blazes continue to burn, destroying vast stretches of forest.
According to Global Forest Watch, Syria recorded 339 fire alerts between June 30 and July 7, 2025 — a staggering number in just one week. These blazes are not isolated or short-lived incidents. Wildfires have become a recurring feature in recent years, most recently in the same regions in 2023, and their causes are complex.
A combination of environmental and political factors is fueling the crisis: Climate change, which is driving similar disasters across the globe, is intersecting with the long-term consequences of Syria’s protracted war, including dangerous debris scattered across forested areas. Added to this are the complex political and social dynamics the country has faced since the fall of the former regime.
In the wake of the disaster, social and traditional media have become a battleground for competing claims and accusations over who was behind the fires. The militant group Ansar al-Sunna claimed responsibility via its Telegram channel for igniting fires in the Qastal Maaf area, north of Latakia. Three days later, a newly created Facebook page (with only five followers and no prior activity) posted a statement in which the Coastal Shield Brigade, a faction linked to Alawite fighters from the former regime, claimed responsibility. The statement was signed by a so-called Maj. Gen. Miqdad Fatiha, an Alawite figure who does not officially hold that rank. The page’s lack of other content and the suspicious timing of its creation suggest it was fabricated to deflect blame from Ansar al-Sunna, the same group that claimed a Damascus church attack just a month earlier. Both incidents triggered widespread controversy, disbelief and public debate over the identity of the true perpetrators.
The conflicting claims and online skirmishes underscore the deep fractures that still divide Syrian society in the post-Assad era. Some voices accuse remnants of the former regime of trying to distract the new government and derail its agenda. Others point to factions aligned with the transitional government, alleging a plan to push Alawite communities off their land so that fire-damaged plots can be sold or transferred to investors from Qatar or Turkey, possibly paving the way for the resettlement of foreign fighters.
The dispute lays bare a painful reality: Competing sectarian and economic interests are locked in a struggle for land and power. Amid the noise, it is unlikely those who set the fires will be definitively identified.
In the years leading up to the regime’s collapse, hundreds of wildfires swept through Syria’s forests, and Damascus never managed to slow the flames, let alone name the culprits. Decades of poor management have stripped the country of most of its pine and mixed woodlands. Forest now covers less than 1% of Syria’s roughly 71,500 square miles, down from more than 15% in the early 1970s. Global Forest Watch estimates that fires erased about 44,500 acres of tree cover between 2001 and 2024, while another 30,900 acres disappeared for other reasons. The worst year on record was 2012, but 2025 is on pace to surpass it.
This month’s fires have stripped at least 38 square miles of vegetation, an area roughly the size of Damascus or twice that of Latakia. The economic toll is harder to pin down, but most local communities depend on these forests for fuel, forage and seasonal income. Without tree cover, temperatures will climb, rainfall will drop and drought will deepen, driving the risk of desertification to more than five times its previous level. Restoring the landscape could take decades, assuming reforestation will eventually happen. Locals fear that investors will step in to claim the charred mountains instead.
The Syrian Ministry of Emergency and Disaster Management blamed the fires on hot, dry winds, higher-than-average temperatures and the presence of unexploded ordnance and land mines left by the war. The statement followed social media claims, triggered by a viral video that showed someone igniting brush in similar terrain, that local residents had set the blazes. It became apparent later that the clip came from Izmir, Turkey, where civil defence crews were demonstrating a controlled-burn technique that removes flammable material to halt the spread of a wildfire.
“What’s happened to our forests these past few days was bound to happen,” Mahmoud Ali, a professor of ecology and forest protection at Latakia University, told New Lines. “I’ve warned again and again that if we kept the same forestry policies, Syria’s woods would disappear. And now they have.”
Ali said forestry decision-makers in the country spent recent years chasing enemies instead of protecting trees, “silencing critics, punishing anyone who took note or interacted with them, and even blocking professors from taking students into the forest without permission.” Lamenting countless missed opportunities, Ali added, “If we’d worked together as a team, put real preventive measures in place, cracked down on illegal logging and given fire crews clear access, we could have saved Syria’s green lung, which was consumed by cancer.” According to the professor, “The real culprit is the negligence of successive governments, which never put basic safeguards in place.
“This is made worse by our meager firefighting resources, rugged terrain, tinder-dry vegetation, overlapping farmland and forest and scant environmental awareness,” he said. “Some blazes were clearly set on purpose, but with proper preventive steps, we could have limited the burn zone and made it far easier for crews to surround the fire and stop its spread.”
Moreover, he dismissed climate change as a convenient scapegoat: “Extreme weather affects everyone, yet no other country has been stripped of its forests the way we have. France’s recent wildfires were contained in days.”
The spread and expansion of these fires cannot be pinned solely on poor forest management practices, though. To sufficiently explain this catastrophic outcome, other incidents and background events have to be considered. The same agencies that have long controlled the firefighting apparatus are directly responsible for letting the fires spin out of control.
In repeated social media appeals, activists have demanded the reinstatement of firefighters who were dismissed as part of the new government’s broader purge of public sector employees. A former firefighter involved in last year’s operations in the al-Bassit area told New Lines that these workers “have deep experience in tackling forest fires, especially large-scale blazes. Their dismissal stripped the region of vital on-the-ground skills.”
More than 500 firefighters were let go — professionals with decades of collective experience and an unmatched expertise in disaster management across Syria. Regardless of the official narrative, then, the transitional government’s decisions bear significant responsibility for the scale of the current disaster. The problem isn’t just technical; it’s political. The removal of trained local firefighters, who had proven their effectiveness despite limited resources, was followed by the appointment of outsiders to key positions across the coastal governorates, many lacking the necessary qualifications.
Another former firefighter, who asked to remain anonymous, told New Lines: “One of the disasters caused by the new leadership in Latakia is that they relocated — actually, stole — more than half of the fire trucks stationed in Latakia and surrounding areas and sent them to Idlib and its countryside. They claimed there were too many trucks in the governorate, without grasping how crucial this equipment is for the coast, which faces large, recurring seasonal fires.”
In a similar vein, a former head of Syria’s agriculture directorate noted that “key forestry equipment, including tractors and bulldozers, was either looted or vandalized by unknown individuals. This equipment was specifically designated for fire response in these areas.”
Another reason, the former director explained, is that many modern fire stations built deep within the forests to tackle frequent blazes were shut down, severely weakening the ability to contain fires early on. “This happened in areas like Ballouran, Beit al-Qasir and al-Bassit, where forestry workers were dismissed without any clear justification, aside from the chaos of the transitional government, its contradictory policies and its failure to grasp the importance of sectors like forestry,” he said. “From what I’ve seen and heard, residents tried contacting fire stations in Latakia for over two consecutive days without any response. That inaction, to use a gentle word, gave the fires room to spread and grow. What followed was a major environmental and humanitarian disaster, one that no sect or religion can protect anyone from.”
These fires come at a time when Syria is grappling with one of the world’s worst food security crises. According to a July report by the Food and Agriculture Organization, 4 in 10 Syrians are suffering from severe food insecurity. Worse still, the country is experiencing its most severe drought in 36 years. The report notes that between November 2024 and April 2025, rainfall levels were just half the average. Currently, three-quarters of Syria’s rain-fed agricultural areas are under drought stress, especially in key food-producing regions like the Jazira, which hasn’t seen any rainfall at all this year.
Furthermore, Syria has managed to cultivate only 40% of its planned agricultural land this year, due to limited water resources and the destruction of vital infrastructure, depriving half the population of an essential source of livelihood. Combined with widespread displacement, this has resulted in a projected wheat production shortfall of 2.73 million tons, enough to feed 16 million people for a year. With recent forest fires devastating one of the country’s most fertile regions, and with several other key crops such as olives failing, Syria is now staring down the barrel of another mass displacement, either to nearby cities or across borders.
The fires are still burning, and Lebanon has now joined Turkey and Jordan in efforts to help extinguish them. With dry winds expected to continue, there’s a high risk the fires will rage on for days, and new blazes could break out along the Syrian coast. Today, Syrians stand before the ashes of their forests, reckoning with an irretrievable loss and a haunting sense of regret for what once was and what may never return. This land, which has withstood everything from war to drought, deserves more than survival. It deserves to be protected, inhabited and cherished, before it slips into memory.
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