Gasoline in wartime (Swiss Stories 2014, by Gianluca Grossi) - Swiss Press Award

Sito web Informazione RSI (Radiotelevisione svizzera di lingua italiana)

Gianluca Grossi

Deir ez-Zor province, in eastern Syria, near the village of Muhassan (or Mohassen or Mohassan), not far from the border with Iraq. It's a frequent sight, increasingly common. Just get close and you realize it involves oil: gallons and gallons of oil. Boys blackened by smoke and grease are busy refining crude oil in small-scale operations. A new gold rush, lucrative, certainly, but also dangerous: this uncontrolled process has already caused numerous injuries. The environmental consequences are also significant in an agricultural area crossed by the Euphrates River. In eastern Syria, rebels have captured most of the government-run oil wells, including the very large al-Omar well. The rebels are incapable of refining crude oil on a large scale: Syria's main processing facilities are located in Homs and Banias, cities still controlled by the regular army. The people who until yesterday worked in the fields, now open-air refineries, are responsible for removing it from the extraction wells. The crude oil is set alight, and the resulting steam is cooled through a pipeline dug underground. Once the process is complete, gasoline and diesel, increasingly needed by the population and the rebels, end up on the market—at a price now quadrupled. Some of the refined crude oil, according to some reports, also appears to be destined for the black market in Turkey. Before the war, oil was a pillar of the Syrian economy, producing 380,000 barrels a day, some of which was also exported. In 2010, oil brought in over $3 billion to the government. The loss of a significant number of oil wells is a severe blow to President Bashar al-Assad's regime.