The engine sputtered. With his foot on the accelerator, Ismaïl Mohammed drove his tractor across the fields. Lush plots, where the cereal stalks sway in the gusts, passed by his eyes. "Here, we grow everything: wheat, cotton, vegetables, tomatoes, eggplants, chickpeas and even corn," said the 67-year-old man with a long graying beard, wearing a red keffiyeh and struggling with his large steering wheel on the sandy track, on April 29.

In Al-Jafra, a hamlet located 9 kilometers south of the city of Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria, the apparent lushness of the Euphrates banks, flowing a few dozen meters away, should not mislead uninformed visitors. "It used to be much greener. It felt like paradise," said the nostalgic sexagenarian. Beyond the irrigated lands, gnawed by the Badiya desert lying in the West, a dusty landscape stretches as far as the eye can see. "I've never seen such drought in my life," said Mohammed.

His first harvest since returning "will be unsuccessful," predicted this lifelong farmer. In 2012, when the sky began raining bombs dropped by the Bashar al-Assad regime's air force, he fled with his wife, Hamouda Hamadi, 62, their five children, 10 cows and 50 sheep. Like nearly 60% of the Syrian population, they were displaced, wandering from camp to camp in northeastern Syria, forced to sell their livestock to survive − "A humiliating life," in his words. After the region was retaken by al-Assad, he ensured he wasn't wanted by intelligence services before returning in spring 2024. The "relief" of finding his land was quickly overshadowed by desolation.

'The worst drought since 1958'

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