JUST AFTER DAWN on a cold morning in December 2024, explosions tore across the volcanic hills near the village of Sahwet Balata in southern Syria’s Sweida governorate (an administrative unit similar to a province). It was one of several Israeli airstrikes that week, part of a broader campaign targeting sites across the country. Villagers awoke to the thunder of collapsing concrete and the sight of smoke rolling through an oak-covered ridgeline as Israeli missiles flattened bunkers at a military base and peeled open a munitions depot with surgical precision.

For years, the base, which includes an old oak grove, had been guarded by Syrian troops and therefore avoided by locals and loggers alike. In a province where many forests were stripped for fuel and profit over 13 years of protracted civil war, the outpost had created an unlikely sanctuary for one of the last intact oak stands in the region.

When the bombs landed, no civilians were hurt. Against the odds, the trees survived as well, their twisted trunks silhouetted against a dusty sky. Beside them, a rusting tank lay tilted on its tracks — abandoned when government forces fled days earlier, following the overthrow of Syria’s former dictator, Bashar al-Assad.

“If we cut these trees, what’s left? We’ve already lost enough.”

The strikes marked a turning point for the region. With Assad’s army withdrawn, a power vacuum emerged — quickly filled by local militias, spiritual leaders, and improvised civic groups. Instability deepened, and so did uncertainty about what would come next. Locals feared that without some level of protection, the oak grove at the abandoned base would fall to loggers. So villagers organized armed patrols, setting up watches to keep intruders out. One year on, despite worsening economic and humanitarian conditions, some locals are still taking shifts to protect the grove, determined to defend it.

“We need firewood too,” said Youssef, a farmer in his forties who volunteers there regularly and asked to be identified only by his first name due to safety concerns. “But if we cut these trees, what’s left? We’ve already lost enough.”

SITUATED ON THE western edge of the Syrian Desert, Sweida province encompasses almost all of the Jabal Druze mountains, the mostly barren lava fields of Lajat, and a section of the arid eastern steppe of Harrat al-Sham. Its capital city, also called Sweida, is steeped in history, established some 2,000 years ago by the Nabateans (the people of ancient Arabia), and overtaken by the Romans shortly thereafter. During the Ottoman Empire, the region was protected from direct Ottoman control by the mountainous terrain, and was dominated instead by feudal lords.

The province is the heartland of Syria’s Druze minority, a small but politically influential ethnoreligious group, which constitutes just 3 percent of Syria’s predominantly Muslim population. The Druze faith, which branched from Islam in the eleventh century bce, is secretive and syncretic. The community tends to be tightly knit, fiercely independent, and deeply loyal to local leaders, especially spiritual sheikhs. For generations, Christians and pastoral Sunni Muslims — who make up a small portion of Sweida’s population of about 313,000 — lived side by side with the Druze majority.

During Syria’s civil war — which grew out of the largely peaceful pro-democracy Arab Spring protests of 2011 — the Druze avoided aligning fully with either opposition or regime forces, preferring instead to stay on their own territory and build some degree of autonomy. This made Sweida both a haven from war and a symbol of localized resistance for its refusal to be drawn into the sectarian bloodshed that consumed much of Syria for more than a decade. In many ways, this spared the region much of the devastation that flattened other provinces.

But the neutrality did carry a cost: Outside critics accused the province of standing aside during the protracted struggle against Syria’s repressive dictatorship that killed 600,000 Syrians, internally displaced 7 million more, and caused some 6 million people to flee the country. And despite efforts to stay off the main battlefronts during the war, Sweida did suffer its impacts. With limited regime investment in the governorate, and increasing isolation of the nation as the Syrian government came under US sanctions, Sweida slid into a prolonged state of neglect. Corruption spread, organized crime flourished, and poverty in the largely agricultural region deepened. By the time the Assad regime collapsed in late 2024, Sweida was already caught between weak state control and rising militia influence — conditions that only worsened in the transition that followed.

By the time the Israeli missiles fell in December 2024, much of the province’s woodland had already been turned into fuel and profit. The grove at Sahwet Balata, by accident and vigilance, was one of the last oak stands that remained. Its survival has now taken on symbolic and ecological urgency.

THE LANDSCAPE HERE has its own long history. Sweida lies just south of what was once Syria’s primary greenbelt. Its forests consisted mostly of evergreen maqui trees on the volcanic slopes of Jabal Druze and low canopies of Levantine oak, pistachio, and wild almond. These woodlands were part of a wider Eastern Mediterranean ecological zone — one of the few regions on the continent where oaks and Mediterranean shrubland once grew in notable density.

In Sweida’s semi-arid climate, villages traditionally managed these woods conservatively: Families coppiced and pruned oaks for fuel, grazed goats seasonally, and treated woodlands as communal lifelines. Local forestry officials say that, until 2011, mechanized clear-cutting was rare, planted belts and small reserves dotted the governorate, and fire seasons, while damaging, were not routinely catastrophic.

During the war, fuel shortages, widespread poverty, and a lack of environmental enforcement turned selective use into large-scale cutting and land conversion across not only Sweida but much of the country. Most harvested wood went toward heating during the cold winter months, while some made it into the illicit trade abroad. Even wooden benches in Sweida city public parks were removed for firewood.

Local activist Ahmed Ali — who asked to be identified by a pseudonym due to safety concerns — describes how quickly forests were lost. In 2022, Ali was camping with a small group of locals at the edge of a five-hectare forested plot near the Ar Rom Dam, one of Sweida’s key ecological sites, some seven miles from the city of Sweida, when he awoke at dawn to the sound of axes. When his group approached the loggers, they were met with rifles. They retreated, but stayed close enough to watch. Within 72 hours, the entire woodlot was gone, the logs carried away on three-ton trucks.

“Smugglers don’t ask where the wood comes from — only how fast they can load it.”

“Some of it went to fuel vendors, some ended up as furniture, and the rest just disappeared across the border with Jordan,” said Ali, who spoke with other eyewitnesses to track logging patterns across Sweida. “During the worst winters, people would cut anything. We used to think parks and groves were safe. But in these years, nothing has been off-limits. Smugglers don’t ask where the wood comes from — only how fast they can load it.”

Intensive tree-cutting during the war also increased fire risk, since felling for fuel often involves converting wood into charcoal using burns that can spark wildfires. This happened in May 2020 when a blaze at Dhamna Reserve — an ecologically important 650-hectare area in the hills above Sweida city — spread rapidly and damaged about 1,010 hectares of land, including more than 500 mature oaks and some 10,000 other trees. The same fire season torched hundreds of additional hectares across the governorate, including about 16,000 hectares of cropland. Other factors compounded losses. The country’s decades-long drought made freshly cleared slopes burn hotter, and repeated fire seasons finished off large patches of what forest remained.

Similar scenarios played out across the country during the war: Aerial surveys indicate that western Syria lost some 63,700 hectares, or 19 percent, of forest cover between 2010 and 2019. A century ago, researchers estimate that between 15 and 32 percent of Syria was forested, home to diverse oak species, as well as cedar, fir, cypress, and pine. These forests once sustained rural life and local wildlife — wild boar, foxes, porcupines, and many native birds and reptiles. But even before the war much of the cover had already been lost to urban growth, farming, and logging. Today, natural forests cover as little as 0.5 percent of the country.

After seeing the devastation around the dam, Ali joined hands with other volunteers and businesspeople to try to stitch the hills back together. In 2023, they pooled money for seedlings and dug trenches near the site, planting laurel, cypress, and oak by hand, hauling water in jerrycans through dry summers. These campaigns were fragile from the start. And as the governance system unraveled, patrols stopped and logging laws went unenforced. Meaningful protection largely vanished.

IN LATE 2024, immediately after regime soldiers pulled out, Sweida forestry chief Anwar al-Tawell looked out his office window to find about a dozen loggers idling their trucks outside his company headquarters in Sweida city, axes and chainsaws already whining at the small stand of oaks by the gate. He and two officers stepped between the men and the trees. After a tense standoff, during which shots were fired, the trucks turned around.

The reprieve was brief. In the days that followed, logging crews and armed factions moved through the province. Remaining stands were felled and, by early 2025, large sections of woodland had been seized and ploughed or staked off for private cultivation. Even some trees around the forestry office were logged.

Under Syria’s forestry laws, nearly all of the country’s woodlands have some form of protected status. Forests on state-owned land are shielded from sale and development, and privately held forests are subject to restrictions that typically require clearance from local forestry offices before any cutting or land use change. These offices operate under the Syrian Ministry of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform and are responsible for monitoring violations, managing permits, and responding to environmental infractions. In theory, illegal logging carries both fines and prison sentences. But enforcement of these laws has long been a challenge.

Even before the war, many local forestry units were underfunded and understaffed. In Sweida, for example, the governorate’s roughly 30-person forestry unit is tasked with overseeing an area of 5,550 square kilometers — an impossible mandate under normal conditions, let alone in a war zone. After the fall of the Assad regime, their role became even more precarious, with no centralized enforcement structure and growing pressure from armed actors.

“We never had the people or the budget to monitor the forests properly, even before the war,” said al-Tawell. “Once the militias started clearing land, all we could do was file reports. They came with weapons; we had notebooks and old uniforms. Everyone knew who had the power.”

“We record what we can. If the day comes when someone asks what happened to the forests, we’ll have answers.”

Despite these constraints, collaboration between forestry staff and local residents emerged in some areas as a fragile line of defense. According to one officer who spoke on the condition of anonymity, community-led efforts were often the only reason some stands survived as long as they did. These partnerships, though small in scale and often short-lived, were reported across the governorate as villagers planted native species, repaired firebreaks, and reported smuggling attempts.

Locals also help with record-keeping. The names of loggers and their alleged crimes circulate in town and online — sometimes through the loggers’ own posts advertising firewood — then echo through forestry reports and activists’ dossiers. The activists archive photos, license plate numbers, and GPS pins associated with logging operations, hoping there will one day be a path to environmental justice. “We can’t stop every truck, but we can make sure it’s not forgotten,” said Ali. “We record what we can. If the day comes when someone asks what happened to the forests, we’ll have answers.”

The records compiled through these cooperative efforts include reports about a local landowner-turned-logging-operator whose crews moved into the woodlands surrounding the Ar Rom Dam. They document the actions of a repeat offender, his saw-fitted vehicle capable of uprooting entire trees; they detail how other loggers targeted trees on a site run by the Syrian Agricultural Directorate, including decades-old cypress trees managed by the Syrian General Commission for Scientific Agricultural Research. “It was symbolic,” said a former employee of the research center who asked not to be named. “They destroyed not just trees, but years of work.”

The activists note that several loggers are also linked to the drug trade, specifically trafficking the illegal amphetamine Captagon. “It’s all connected,” said Ali. “Timber, Captagon, weapons — the networks are the same.”

All told, al-Tawell has documented more than 500 felony cases of illegal logging in the last 10 years. “Every tree cut, every name, I write it down,” he said. He has files filled with repeat offenders. “But the papers are useless — general pardons from Damascus come every two years. You pay a small fine and go back to cutting. The law is a joke.”

The unit’s officers each earn roughly $50 per month — not enough for basics, let alone fuel for patrols, which they must pay for themselves. When they do get out, they meet militias dozens strong.

We face 50 men with rifles and trucks,” one officer said. “We are five men with nothing. What can we do?” Several patrols have ended in violence, the officers ambushed. “It isn’t about wood,” al-Tawell said. “It’s about power.” Even their uniforms are a liability. “Wearing the badge makes you a target,” he added. Back at headquarters, al-Tawell gestured to the last few trees outside the office — the only shade they still defend.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF Sweida’s deforestation are deeply felt across the province. Hills once shaded by oak and pine are now bare. Roots ripped from the ground lie scattered like bones. Goats roam freely, gnawing the soft tips of whatever regrows. “Goats even eat the flowers and the new leaves of trees trying to regrow from the stump,” Ali said. “And many loggers still come after the trunk is gone, digging out the stump to sell.”

The ecological impact of this denuding is far-reaching. In a region long dependent on fragile water sources, the loss of forest cover has deepened ongoing drought. “When you cut the forest, you cut the rain,” Ali said. “Before, streams flowed year-round. Now, they dry by summer.” Springs that once supplied villages have dwindled to trickles, polluted and unsafe. A shallow dam outside Sweida city now holds only stagnant pools. Soil erosion compounds the harm. Without roots to anchor it, earth slips downhill during storms, burying fields in rock and soil. Farmers clear more land to compensate, accelerating the cycle of destruction, and threatening plants native to the region, including rare flowers and endemic herbs.

The land that once held dense oak and layered history now lies exposed.

The damage also feeds conflict. Forests turned to farmland invite disputes over ownership. Armed groups seize cleared land, fencing it for crops or grazing. Bedouin herders drive goats into new areas, igniting tensions with settled Druze villagers. “It is not about religious identity,” said Ali. “It is about land — who controls it, who eats from it.”

The loss is not only ecological. Before the war, Sweida’s hills drew visitors for what lay beneath the canopies: ruins from Roman and Byzantine times scattered through the woods, pathways that doubled as open-air classrooms. Having also worked as a guide, al-Tawell described walking tourists under oaks to point out tumbling walls, carved stones, and ancient burial markers of both Christian and Jewish graves. “The tourists stopped coming when the war began, and the forest started vanishing not long after,” he said. “I used to guide people through those trails ... Now it’s quiet for all the wrong reasons.”

Alongside the loggers, looters came with shovels and metal detectors. Some found coins or fragments of metal; most left holes. The same tracks that carried timber out also carried artifacts away, al-Tawell said. The land that once held dense oak and layered history now lies exposed. “It wasn’t just trees,” al-Tawell said. “It was a forest built on stone and time.”

JUST OUTSIDE THE city of Sweida, rows of oak (Quercus calliprinos) and wild pistachio seedlings sit beside trays of cypress, Aleppo pine, and bay laurel in Khaldoun Aljabor’s nursery. These are the staples for dryland restoration in the province, and Aljabor tries to keep them in stock. Under a cloth canopy stretched between poles, Aljabor and a group of Bedouin women he employs tend lines of herb seedlings — Syrian oregano (za’atar), marjoram, rosemary, sage, thyme, and chamomile. The space is cool and quiet, dappled with filtered light and the hum of bees drifting between trays. These herbs aren’t just for culinary or medicinal use: Local growers plant them between orchard rows to reduce erosion, improve soil health, and extract essential oils. The modest nursery doubles as a communal project and a quiet form of environmental repair, rooted in cooperation.

As he led me through the site, Aljabor pointed out how well each species handles cold snaps, whether they can survive summer drought, and what they might be used for: oaks for long-term restoration, cypress for quick cover, pine for windbreaks, oregano where water access is tight. The nursery is a small but active business that sells to farmers, volunteers, and community groups trying to replant their land.

“We don’t just grow for beauty,” said Aljabor, who trains his team in seedling care, grafting, and acclimating plants to the outdoors before field delivery. “Every plant here is grown for a reason — to survive, to hold the soil, to feed someone, or to slow damage. If it can’t do that, we don’t waste space on it.”

All these efforts — to regrow, to document, to protect — have been besieged by setbacks.

Ali, the local activist, described how goats strip seedlings before they mature, fires sweep through reforested plots, and some villagers uproot young trees to plant crops and claim land. Volunteers tracking loggers described threats from men linked to local crews; one recalled a masked group at his door at night, warning him to stop filming trucks.

As I talked with Aljabor over coffee and pistachios in late June, the worst was yet to come. A few weeks later, in July, a roadside dispute between Druze and Bedouin fighters escalated long-simmering ethnic tensions into full-scale fighting, prompting the Syrian transitional government in Damascus to send soldiers into the province, which only worsened the situation. The calm of Aljabor’s nursery gave way to gunfire.

During several days of violence, more than 1,000 people were killed and over 170,000 Bedouin families, including those working at the nursery, fled the province, fearing retaliation from the Druze militias. The damage to property was extensive as well. Houses and shops across Sweida were torched by both factions, olive groves burned, and farm stores and plant nurseries, including that of Aljabor, were ransacked. Grain silos and bakeries were put out of service, deepening food shortages. Water pumps, irrigation lines, and roads were cut off. And like so much else, years of restoration work — saplings, orchards, terraces — were reduced to ash.

The violence ebbed in late July under a US-backed truce, but in the months since, little has recovered. Activists describe a province under de facto siege by the Syrian government, with roads open only to humanitarian convoys run by international organizations. The trucks bring staples and a trickle of medicines, but crucial treatments — oncology drugs, insulin, and more — are missing. So is fuel, a critical need as winter sets in.

Civil initiatives, from seedling days to quiet circles for dialogue, are on pause. Volunteers who once planted on weekends now queue for bread and medicine. “My family is okay, but psychologically we’re not,” Ali told me recently. “We live in constant tension.”

The oak grove above Sahwet Balata, however, remains standing. Tucked into a remote ridgeline away from the main roads and tribal fault lines, it was spared the destruction that swept through much of Sweida in July. It has also survived the prolonged drought that has completely dried out the Ar Rom Dam, causing many other mature trees in the region to die.

The number of volunteers who once kept watch over the oak grove has dwindled. Some still visit when they can. Others have shifted their focus to documenting new logging sites farther away. The grove’s survival is not a sign of stability, they say — only of isolation.

“It’s still there because no one’s come for it,” one of the volunteers, who still takes shifts to guard the trees, said. “That’s not protection. That’s luck.”