Photo by Walid Jawad. “Palm trees are everywhere in Iraq,” says artist Ahmad AlKarkhi. “You grow up seeing them everywhere.” AlKarkhi fled from Baghdad in 2006, but he continues to paint his memories of his war-torn homeland.
My friend is from Basra, an Iraqi city on the borders of Iran and Kuwait, which once held the world’s most dense and extensive date palm groves. During the Iran-Iraq war, those thick rows of palm trees acted as a natural barrier — you couldn’t see far distances through them.
The brutality of that long war destroyed many groves through bombing, but the greater tragedy came from Saddam Hussein’s regime, who burned some of those groves deliberately to clear sightlines for the army to shoot and defend against incoming fire.
My friend’s grandfather owned one of those groves, the kind so vast you couldn’t see where it ended. After the regime burned it, the loss was a catastrophe to him. He said he felt like he would die of heartbreak over those palm trees. A few weeks later, he died of a heart attack.
The connection to land is too large of a feeling for it be considered a resource or an asset. Colonial projects on the other hand have always treated the natural world as either an obstacle or collateral. Aside from the moral, ethical, and human rights implications of war, a common misconception is that once the troops withdraw, countries immediately end their involvement and shut the door in the face of the war aftermath, which holds refugees, asylum seekers, and other existential threats in the form of environmental destruction and detrimental emissions.
Despite medical doctors and health professionals in Iraq calling for more research on war-related environmental pollution since 2003 as a potential contributor to the country’s high rates of poor health conditions, little has been done and the problem is now more prominent than ever. Furthermore, the UN Environment Programme’s flagship Emissions Gap report has for the first time mentioned conflict and military emissions as a cause of concern.
The current Israel-Gaza conflict is a critical example.
A study released on January 9 2024 titled “A Multitemporal Snapshot of Greenhouse Gas Emissions from the Israel-Gaza Conflict” revealed that greenhouse gas emissions from the first 60 days of the Israeli attacks on Gaza are greater than the annual emissions of 20 individual countries and territories. At the time of writing this article, the conflict had been ongoing for more than 500 days.
To add further perspective to the enormity of the damage caused by the Israel-Gaza conflict, in 2003 alone, the US dropped around 20,200 bombs on Iraq, whereas Israel dropped 29,000 bombs on Gaza just in the first 6 weeks.
Additionally, the U.S. Department of Defence is the world’s single largest institutional consumer of oil – and as a result, one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters. The U.S.A and their allies’s wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan have used military vehicles that consume petroleum-based fuels at an extremely high rate. And the emissions don’t just come from using weapons, their manufacturing is a major contributor to pollution. If anything, more emissions come from producing the machinery, for example, in creating the metal for their casings.
The use of white phosphorus adds another layer to this. During the 44-day war in Artsakh in 2020, Azerbaijan directly targeted civilian settlements with chemical weapons, causing mass destruction, human losses, and long-term suffering and was confirmed to have violated Article 35 of the Geneva Convention.
It’s considered one of the largest demonstrations of drone warfare that would go on to shape both the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts. The environmental contamination follows the same pattern: white phosphorus burns at extreme temperatures, cannot be extinguished with water, and poisons soil and groundwater for decades. And as we’ve seen time and time again, what gets trialled in one theatre gets played in the next. This isn’t a coincidence, it’s a pattern - one that demonstrates that environmental destruction is not the collateral of war, it is the strategy.
War and conflict has also created a radical destruction of the forest cover in the Middle East, and in turn causing significant harm to biodiversity and animal and bird populations. The attacks on Gaza have resulted in damage or loss of around 48% of its tree covers in early 2024. By late 2025 it is estimated that 98% of Gaza’s tree cropland had been destroyed. This severe intentional environmental damage is called Ecocide and the number of experts concerned is rapidly growing and there has been calls for the International Criminal Court to introduce ecocide as a new crime.
When you look back on the global reaction to Iraq, Ukraine, and Artsakh then compare it to the response for Gaza since late 2023, you have to acknowledge the unprecedented measures that international bodies have finally decided to take. While some might view it as a symbolic gesture to introduce ecocide as a new crime, it remains a win, and that win means that we no longer separate the destruction of land from the destruction of a population as two separate crimes. They are one.
You cannot commit ecocide on land you claim is yours.
And you cannot take an action that is objectively a crime and justify it from a different angle, claiming it will end terrorism in the long run, or that the destruction is necessary, or that the math works out. It is long past time we call things as they are: these attacks are not waged against terrorism. This is a war against a people, their history, their roots, and the land that holds both.