Syria's geography: a wet coastal rim and a dry plateau fed by one river

How the coastal mountains catch the rain

Syria's Mediterranean shore is short, about 180 kilometres between Turkey and Lebanon by Britannica's measure, a run of sandy bays, rocky headlands and low cliffs. Behind it rises the Al-Ansariyyah range, also called the Syrian Coastal Mountains, about 32 kilometres wide, falling from an average height of 900 metres in the north to about 600 metres in the south and reaching 1,562 metres east of Latakia.

The range decides the climate of everything behind it. Its western slopes catch the moist winds off the sea and receive 760 to 1,000 millimetres of rain a year, most of it between November and May; the eastern slopes get hot, dry winds off the desert. That contrast shows in the settlement pattern, since Wikipedia's geography summary records the western slopes as more fertile and more heavily populated than the eastern ones.

Directly east of the mountains lies the Ghab, a longitudinal trench about 64 kilometres long that carries the Orontes northward toward Antioch in Turkey. The Ghab is a rain shadow with scanty rainfall of its own, but it holds about 19 major springs and underground rivers, and the Wikipedia summary describes it as a fertile, irrigated trench.

At the southern end of the coastal range the mountains break off and leave a corridor, the Homs Gap, between them and the Anti-Lebanon. The highway and railway from Homs to the Lebanese port of Tripoli run through it, and Mediterranean rain clouds pass through it to reach Homs and, in some years, the steppe east of the city.

Why Damascus sits in an oasis

South of the gap the Anti-Lebanon Mountains close the way again. Their main ridge reaches 2,629 metres near Al-Nabk and their mean height is 1,800 to 2,100 metres. Mount Hermon, at the southern end, rises to 2,814 metres. With the sea's rain cut off, Damascus receives less than 200 millimetres a year and stands in the semi-arid steppe.

What keeps it green is the Barada, a river that rises in the Anti-Lebanon, waters the Ghouta oasis on which the city was built and then disappears into the desert. Wikipedia's geography summary gives the oasis about 370 square kilometres and records that suburban housing and light industry from Damascus were already eating into it in the mid-1980s. Aqueducts built in Roman times still carry the Barada's water to it.

Where the rain gives out on the plateau

East of the mountains everything is plateau. Britannica describes the Syrian Desert as undulating plains between 300 and 500 metres above sea level and seldom below 250, and stresses what the name hides: it is "not a sand desert but comprises rock and gravel steppe". In the south-central part the plateau rises into the stony Hamad.

Rainfall falls away eastward as fast as the land flattens. The steppe receives 250 to 500 millimetres, Mount al-Druze in the far south more than 200 and the Hamad less than 130, and in the south-east the total drops below 100 millimetres and changes widely from year to year. A semi-arid steppe zone covers three-quarters of the country between the wet coast and the true desert.

The plateau is hot in summer and cold in winter. Damascus and Aleppo average summer highs in the mid-30s Celsius and winter lows of 1 to 4 degrees. In the desert at Tadmur and Deir ez-Zor, summer maxima average in the upper 30s to low 40s, with extremes in the mid to upper 40s. Snow can fall away from the coast and frosts are common from November to March. Once or twice a year a khamsin, a sand-bearing wind, raises a wall of dust about 1,500 metres high that darkens the sky.

A low chain of hills, the Jabal ar-Ruwaq, the Jabal Abu Rujmayn and the Jabal Bishri, crosses the plateau from south-west to north-east toward the Euphrates. South of it is the Hamad; north of it, east of Homs, is a hard-packed barren plain. In the far south the land turns volcanic: the Hauran plateau south of Damascus is studded with volcanic cones, and the Jabal al-Druze beyond it rises to about 1,800 metres, part of a lava field that runs on into Saudi Arabia.

Which rivers Syria depends on

The Euphrates crosses the north-east diagonally, from the Turkish border toward Iraq. Daoudy and Frenken, cited in Wikipedia's article on the river, put its whole length at 3,000 kilometres, of which 1,230 are in Turkey, 710 in Syria and 1,060 in Iraq. Britannica calls it the only navigable river in Syria. Three tributaries join it inside the country: the Sajur, the Balikh, which reaches it at Raqqa, and the Khabur, which rises at karst springs around Ras al-Ayn, passes Hasakah and joins the main river near Busayrah.

Syria completed the Euphrates Dam at Tabqa, upstream of Raqqa, in the 1970s. The reservoir behind it, Lake al-Asad, which the Wikipedia summary calls Euphrates Lake, began to fill in 1973 by Britannica's date and is about 80 kilometres long and eight wide. Wikipedia's article on the river records that it is the main source of drinking water for Aleppo, 75 kilometres to the west.

The water arrives from upstream. Turkey and Syria finished their first dams on the river within a year of each other, and in 1984 Turkey declared that it would let at least 500 cubic metres a second into Syria, a figure the two states fixed by treaty in 1987. In 2025 Karam Shaar Advisory, a research firm, reported Euphrates levels as increasingly erratic, citing damaged irrigation infrastructure in the north-east and Turkey retaining more water upstream.

What the soil will grow and where

Britannica reckons that only about half of Syria's land can support a settled population. Soils outside the river valleys are mostly clays and loams short of phosphorus and organic matter, some chalky and some, along the Euphrates, carrying gypsum. The exception is the black soil of the Jazira, the plain north-east of the Euphrates watered by the Balikh and the Khabur, which irrigation schemes of the 1960s and 1970s turned into a wheat and cotton district.

The land-use shares in Wikipedia's geography summary, drawn from an older Library of Congress country study, give 28% of the land as arable, 4% under permanent crops, 46% as meadow and pasture and 3% as forest and woodland. Most of the forest that remains is in the Al-Ansariyyah Mountains. Britannica records that heavy cutting turned much of it into scrub and that a reforestation project has been started in the hills north of Latakia.

Farming rests on rain more than on canals. Syria's Central Bureau of Statistics, cited by Karam Shaar Advisory, counted 74% of cultivated land, 2.78 million hectares, as rain-fed in 2022 and 26% as irrigated, and most of the irrigated land lies along the Euphrates. The steppe beyond the farmed belt was the grazing land of the Bedouin. In 1958 the state nationalised the badiya, the Syrian Desert, which Britannica puts at some four-fifths of Syrian territory, and stopped recognising tribal holdings; the drought of 1958 to 1961 then killed great numbers of sheep and camels and pushed many herders into the cities.

What the latest drought did to the farmland

Drought comes back. The one of 2006 to 2010 is described by Britannica as the worst in the country's modern history, and it drove hundreds of thousands of farming families into the shanty towns around the cities. Karam Shaar Advisory records another major drought in 2020 and 2021.

The 2024 to 2025 season was worse again by the FAO's measure. Cumulative rainfall in the first quarter of 2025 was 94.9 millimetres, the lowest since FAO records begin in 1997, against an average of 165.4 millimetres for the same months from 1989 to 2015. FAO officials described the season to Xinhua in August 2025 as the driest in nearly 40 years: more than 75% of rain-fed farmland was affected, with rainfall deficits of up to 69% in the main growing areas.

The harvest followed the rain. The FAO estimated 2025 wheat production at 900,000 to 1.1 million tonnes against a national need of nearly 4 million, a shortfall of 2.73 million tonnes. Its food security specialist told Xinhua that more than 95% of rain-fed crops had gone unharvested and that pasture had collapsed, so that fodder prices had doubled and herders sold off much of their flocks. The worst-hit belts ran between Hasakah and Deir ez-Zor, between Aleppo and Idlib, between Homs and Hama, and from rural Damascus south to Daraa.

Where Syrians live on the land

Settlement follows the water. Britannica places the highest densities in the north-west, the south-west and the north-east and along the banks of the main rivers, with the desert steppe, home mostly to Bedouin and oasis dwellers, the emptiest. The great cities sit at the meeting of mountain and steppe: Damascus on the Barada at the foot of Mount Qasioun, Homs on a fertile plain east of the Orontes, Hama astride the Orontes among irrigated orchards, and Aleppo between the Orontes and the Euphrates. Latakia and Tartus are the ports.

The country is divided into 14 governorates, each a muhafaza, which are subdivided into districts and sub-districts.

Migration has moved people across the same map. Much of the Golan's population was expelled to other parts of Syria after 1967, and Britannica records that many of them and their descendants remain internally displaced. About 80,000 Palestinian Arabs took refuge in Syria in 1948, a community estimated at more than 400,000 by the time Britannica wrote, and more than one million Iraqis arrived after 2003.

Which borders are drawn and which are disputed

Wikipedia's account notes that the line with Iraq, recognised when Syria became a League of Nations mandate in 1920, has not changed since. Two other borders are disputed.

In the south-west, Israel has occupied the western two-thirds of the Golan Heights since June 1967 and annexed it by law in 1981. The UN Security Council declared the annexation "null and void" in Resolution 497 of 1981, and Syrian governments have demanded the territory back. The area Israel took in 1967 comprises the Golan plateau proper, about 1,070 square kilometres, and the slopes of the Hermon range, about 100. A buffer zone patrolled by UN observers under the disengagement agreement of 31 May 1974 separated the two sides until Israeli forces crossed it in December 2024. Israel states that its new positions are a security measure; Syria's transitional government demands withdrawal to the lines of 1974, as The National reported in January 2026.

In the north-west, the former Sanjak of Alexandretta passed to Turkey as Hatay province in 1939. Syrian governments have not recognised Turkish sovereignty over it, except for a short period in 1949. At sea, Syria claimed 35 nautical miles of territorial water until 2003, when it declared its maritime zones in line with the 12 nautical miles of the UN Law of the Sea.

What grows wild and what lives there

Yew, lime and fir grow on the mountain slopes, and maquis and garigue scrub cover many of the hillsides below them. The date palm grows in the Euphrates valley; olives, vines, apricots, oaks and poplars grow on the coast and inland; and lemons and oranges along the shore. The steppe has no natural tree cover except a scatter of hawthorns, and Britannica notes that every tree in the orchards of Damascus and Aleppo and along the Orontes and the Euphrates was planted.

The forests yield sumac, used as a spice, wild pistachio, laurel for cosmetics and mulberry for silkworms, and liquorice root is gathered for the pharmaceutical trade. Wildlife is thin. Wolves, hyenas, foxes, badgers, wild boar and jackals survive in remote areas, gazelles and jerboas on the desert margins, and eagles, buzzards, kites and falcons in the mountains.