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The desperate circumstances facing Syria’s young men feed into and are reinforced by a second fundamental transformation: namely the unraveling of Syria’s productive economy, and its replacement by an economy of systematic cannibalization in which impoverished segments of Syrian society increasingly survive by preying upon one another.
The most visible manifestation of this new economy is a culture of looting so developed and entrenched that Syrian vernacular has incorporated a new term—taafeesh—to describe a practice that goes far beyond stealing furniture to include extremes such as stripping houses, streets and factories of plumbing and electrical wiring.
A recent and particularly spectacular example of such systematic looting came with the return of pro-Assad forces to Yarmouk, a sprawling Palestinian camp south of Damascus, in April 2018. Yarmouk’s fall unleashed a wave of plunder that remained in full force as of June, and which will leave the urban landscape almost irreparably scarred. The scale of predation was such that even some pro-Assad militiamen expressed shock, not least because their own properties proved targets for other factions. “I watched uniformed soldiers using a Syrian army tank to rip out electrical cables from six meters underground,” remarked a fighter with a loyalist Palestinian faction, who was scrambling to retrieve belongings from his apartment before it could be pillaged. “I saw soldiers from elite units looting private hospitals and government offices. This isn’t just looting—it’s sabotage of essential infrastructure.”
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