At face value, the city of Hasakah in Syria’s northeast doesn’t suggest a four-year drought is underway. On the outskirts, cotton pickers work away in fields and dozens of trucks line the roads piled high with sacks bursting with raw cotton, while in the local market watermelons and vegetables are on sale, and the hotels have running bath water. The Khabur River that runs through the city is not dry, yet hardly a river at just over ankle deep — exactly what one might expect following a hot and rainless summer, but far less than normal for early autumn. The Hasakah area only received 100 millimeters (mm) of rain this year, well below the annual average of 200 to 250mm. As a result, an estimated 36,000 families from the Hasakah governorate have been driven off the land. In neighboring Deir e-Zour, dust storms caused by desertification were so bad this
