Without the hacksaw, the day’s haul is paltry. He and his friend Basel*, two years his senior, used the fine-toothed blades to weaken the steel rods sticking out of building debris, then twisted them until they snapped. They must now resort to picking up scrap off cuts, but after months of scavenging among the same mounds of grey rubble- once opposition suburbs turned battlefield during the 14 years of war – there is only so much left.

To them, steel scrap fetches only 500 Syrian pounds per kilo – the equivalent of four US cents. On a good day, their harvest might come to 25 kilos. On a bad day, a meagre ten. It’s a risky business, and they know it, but it reportedly pays more than picking up plastic.

While Ahmad and Basel’s day is slow, around them, others are swarming across the blasted land. They drift in and out of the scene, swallowed by the open bellies of the buildings, only to resurface in their gouged-out undergrounds, as they pick their way across a pale blanket of shattered masonry, perhaps just inches away from the next sleeping mortar round.

They are covered in multiple layers of clothes and white chalk, their faces half-hidden by dusty rags: men and women distinguishable only by their eyes, bloodshot with fatigue, and by the forms of their white, calloused hands, which they would not shake with visitors. Almost every day, they scavenge from morning until sunset, amid the reek of burnt plastic, asbestos dust, and broken concrete.

For years, long before rebel troops marched over the capital in December 2024, poor displaced families and their children have come to the ruined peripheries of Damascus to collect scrap rebar, aluminium cables, and twisted pieces of iron plates. Under the Assad regime, most of these lands were no go areas. For the past four years of war, Ahmad and Basel’s families have had access under a special agreement: they would be among the many that made up Assad’s personal army of scrappers.

“The Fourth Division would grant you permission to enter here to work and sell to them,” said one of the men that gathered around us during a break from scavenging through the rubble, the face hidden by an ashy rag, “you couldn’t sell to anyone else.” rights

A scene that should haunt us all: one piece of this steel scrap – bought for a mere 500 Syrian pounds per kilo by desperate families during and after the war, with the covert backing of local warlords – may have been used to build a stadium in Brazil, the Hong Kong International Airport or Dubai’s most famous luxury hotel, the Jumeirah Burj Al Arab; it may also have ended up in a brand-new building apartment in Germany, or found its way into motorways in Romania.

Ahmad and Basel are at the bottom of a supply chain that is indispensable for ‘cleaning’ one of the dirtiest industries in the world: steelmaking.

‘Clean’ steel

Steel forms the backbone of industrial society: from railway lines and ships to the beams that support our buildings, and the weapons that can destroy them. The process of producing this durable material from iron ore, carbon, and various other metals is responsible for almost 11% of the global CO2 emissions.

In the last decade, new technologies to produce recycled steel have garnered the industry’s interest: it is cleaner and, most of all, cheaper; electric arc furnaces, under the correct conditions, consume around 70% less energy than traditional iron ore-based blast furnaces. Turkey’s producers were particularly compelled: in two decades they turned recycled steel production into the fifth largest contributor to the national economy. Turkey is now listed among the major steel producers in the world, with a steel export value estimated at $16.1 billion USD.

The issue with scrap metal, indispensable for the production of recycled steel, is that it is limited. There is barely enough of it in the world to meet the demand. As production volumes of steel are surging worldwide, ferrous scrap is now treated as strategic for the future of many national metal industries.

As the world’s largest importer of ferrous scrap, Turkey has turned it into its humble gold. Yet, not all is known about the country’s discreet sourcing network, which experts and researchers we spoke to described as opaque, unmonitored, and hard to trace.

In economies that industrialised early, scrap metal is abundant. Europe’s scrapyards are overflowing with end-of-life ferrous goods, which are the source of more than half of Turkey’s imported scrap. When the corridors of Brussels filled with whispers of a possible export ban – meant to protect the continent’s bleeding supply -Turkish companies began to look elsewhere to keep the imports flowing, sources in the sector told us. And as it happens, few events generate metal waste as swiftly as war.

We estimated that over the last five years, between 6 and 10% of the scrap recycled in Turkey came from countries we can define as in conflict: Syria, but also Libya, Lebanon, Ukraine, Russia, and Israel/Palestine.

Despite the pittance paid to vulnerable people in conflict zones to dismantle entire battle-scarred neighbourhoods, the scrap metal trade represents a $46 billion market.  Because of a lack of international monitoring and an opaque supply chain, Turkey – and the world’s – hunger for scrap predictably attracts exploitative individuals hoping to bankroll their wars.

The New Arab (TNA), in collaboration with SIRAJ and El Paìs, documented the journey of steel scrap headed to Turkish mills from war-torn countries. We searched for documents in abandoned Assad-era checkpoints, sifted through tens of thousands of maritime traffic records, examined satellite images for shipments, and pieced together leads through dozens of conversations with workers and experts across multiple countries.

This year-long investigation proves that, during the last decade, roughly one tenth of Turkey’s ferrous scrap was sourced from war economies. Under Assad’s order, scrap-loaded trucks exited the country from Lebanese border crossings, to eventually turn up in Turkish private companies’ scrapyards.

Trade data show that several Turkish steel mills ship their finished products to European clients – meaning that conflict-sourced steel is most likely used across the continent.

Opaque due diligence

TNA contacted human rights officers within large European construction companies. Though they requested anonymity, they admitted that human rights abuses in the scrap metal supply chain can go overlooked within due diligence processes. They justified this by pointing to the complexities of the trade, notably its fragmented procurement and limited traceability.

Other sources from Artimet, an independent Turkish inspection company monitoring various stages of the scrap supply chain, confirmed to TNA that their quality controls consist of merely visual inspections.

Artimet representatives added that inspections would not probe how the scrap had been collected or who had profited from it. They told TNA that the end client would not care.

Many of the steel companies in Turkey declined to speak to us or ignored our requests for comment. These include Diler, Kroman, Mescier, Yazici, and Yesilyurt Demir Çelik, companies which this investigation found to be involved in procuring scrap metal from conflict countries. TNA also contacted Turkey’s Ministry of Customs and Trade, inquiring about the controls in place to detect conflict-linked scrap metal. We received no response in time for publication.

The general director of one of Turkey’s major steel companies candidly admitted, during a conversation on background, that scrap may be sourced from war-ravaged territories, including Lebanon, Israel/Palestine and Libya: “The steel of the destroyed buildings [there] will become scrap.” The company publicly declares exporting to more than 60 countries.

Many in the sector seem to be mostly clueless about the possible implications of their tainted supply chains.

The Foreign Trade Department of one of Turkey’s major scrap-dealing companies told TNA that they didn’t have specific policies in place to rule out links between imported scrap and warring factions. “We only purchase scrap from places we know and have worked with for many years,” they explained. The same scrap may then be sold to European countries like Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands.

While the Turkish scrap-dealing company claimed it was not importing scrap from Syria, they admitted to buying from both eastern and western Libya.  Our investigation shows that this is not uncommon: Syria and Libya are just some of the many countries in conflict where the scrap metal trade has been exploited to feed the region’s war machine. Turkish companies are even trading with entities with which the Ankara government has been at loggerheads for years.

Israel, for instance, is among the countries at war from which Turkey buys scrap metal. It remains difficult to determine how much of this scrap originates from Israeli industrial and consumer waste, and how much comes from the devastation it wreaks upon the occupied Palestinian territories. Turkey imposed a commercial embargo on Israel only in mid-2024, in protest of its genocide in Gaza. Despite this, some Turkish media outlets reported that scrap shipments continued through third-country vessels or falsified freight documents, leading the Turkish government to sanction several ships involved. This way of dodging restrictions would be consistent with industry practices revealed by our investigation.

Trading with entities in conflict affected countries is not inherently illegal, but in some cases trade is restricted or banned under sanctions, laws or embargoes. Specifically, for cargoes of steel scrap coming from Haftar’s Libya or Assad’s Syria, the habitual supply standards and procedures are not enough, a senior researcher at the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC), Blanca Racionero Gomez, explained to TNA.

“It’s not so important if you have suppliers coming from war-torn countries. What’s important is if their supply is financing conflict, is exacerbating human rights abuses and is causing environmental damage. That’s what’s important, and what needs to be addressed through due diligence processes,” said Racionero Gomez.

“Because it’s a conflict-affected area, you need to […] be more vigilant than in other areas where information is easier to access,” explained the BHRRC researcher, calling on any company downstream the steel scrap trade to be held accountable.

Syria’s 4th Division and its army of scrap pickers

Wherever Assad’s special army of scrap collectors went, only cement would remain.

Most of Qaboun, a suburb in Damascus, long contested between opposition and loyalist forces during the civil war, has been reduced to a grey wasteland of pulverised cement. There are paths to walk through the mounds and the waste is partitioned into small islands of debris. Anywhere outside these beaten trails may be unsafe: unexploded ordnance lays below the surface, sleeping but only lightly.

The horizon of desolation, sentenced by the low, uneven expanse of crumbling concrete, is betrayed by cut-outs of lush green, disorienting against the opaque haze that surrounds us. Life is flowing back in, now that the Assad forces can no longer prevent residents from returning to the hull of their homes.

As in many of the areas that bore witness to years of fierce battles, none of the buildings’ roofs remained: not because of the fighting, but because the steel rebars had been stripped from the supporting columns. Some recognised what remained of their home only by the pattern on the floor tiles, recalled Mohammad al-Imam, an activist from Daraya, another gutted town south-west of the capital, which rose to prominence as an iconic arena of civil resistance during the early phase of the uprising against Assad.

As Mohammad walks us through Daraya’s barren streets, ringed by the husks of roofless buildings, he regularly points at floors hanging in the void, pinning it on Assad’s forces: “This one was taken down, you see, look, its iron was removed – but this is not detonation, this has been taken down to take the iron.”

They wouldn’t say anything about the children; anyone could work, confirmed Ahmad’s mother, recalling the four years where they had no choice but to toil as steel pickers for the 4th Division, the Syrian military’s elite unit. Her large blue eyes gleaming over a face powdered in white dust by a day of sifting through rubble. “They used to buy it cheaply, [but sold it] expensively,” she told TNA, “it’s known.”

Formed in the 1980s, the 4th Armoured Division effectively served as a praetorian guard for the Assad family, charged with protecting the regime from internal and external threats. Over the course of the civil war, Western sanctions cut Syria off from the global financial system and the 4th Division became central to the regime’s war economy, developing into an amorphous parastate towering over strategic – and mostly illicit – businesses in Syria (such as the manufacture and smuggling of captagon).

It operated under Major General Maher al-Assad’s command, the brother of toppled President Bashar al-Assad and arguably the second most powerful man in the regime. Their intimidating checkpoints were pervasive across the country, yet the Division’s true circle of power clustered around Damascus’s peripheries.

It’s no accident that Qaboun and Daraya, among the areas to suffer the most extensive pillaging, were under the Division’s control. The scrap metal trade – mostly extracted from plundered private properties and infrastructure in former rebel-controlled areas – was one of the unit’s economic revenues.

Bashar al-Assad used to layer relatives, proxies, and front companies between him and his revenue sources. The Syrian Minerals and Investment Company – a private entity founded in 2018 – worked as one of these fronts through the 4th Division.

In 2019, the Assad regime issued Resolution No. 3061, granting the company the right to import and export key materials, including metals, iron, and aluminium. The firm was in charge of issuing permits for contractors, who would purchase scrap on its behalf.

Two years after its establishment, it had already been sanctioned by the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) for its connection with businessman Khodr Ali Taher, a man with long-standing ties with the 4th division. Taher was also known as the “Prince of Crossings” in national media, for the ease he would be wending his way across regime and rebel-controlled areas.

Western sanctions and arrest warrants hang over the heads of many businessmen and military commanders who were part of the 4th Division’s network that capitalised on the bloody scrap metal trade.

Previous investigations have already exposed how the Assad regime and its cronies had been profiting from looting iron scrap from opposition areas that would feed the country’s steel plants. Yet little is known about how scrap has turned into a profitable export commodity sold to Turkish companies; a discreet trade that lasted years, while Turkey-backed opposition militias and Assad’s army have been battling each other.

Burn the evidence

The road winding through the Masnaa-Jdeidat Yabous passage, connecting Beirut to Damascus, is lined with Bashar al-Assad’s faces. Most have been removed from billboards and posters, but those that could not be taken down have been crossed out.

Next to the traffic highway, amid sallow mountain ridges, vehicles laden with goods and people thread the main Beirut-Damascus crossing. An unassuming and doorless single-storey structure stands on the side of the road. Another of the President’s crossed-out faces, plastered over the outer wall, greets passersby.

The place is trashed, full of torched, half-burnt documents. Perhaps, as the news that Assad’s forces were crumbling, someone returned to the checkpoint in a bid to destroy evidence of the regime’s activities, a story often heard in Syria after December 8, 2024.

This was a 4th Division checkpoint located near the Yafour Bridge, in a rural area west of Damascus, along the M1 highway to Beirut,  just 20 kilometers from the Lebanese border crossing. One of the many under the 4th Division’s sway, racked up across major domestic and international highways, part of a strategy to take control of vital export routes.

When Assad’s many faces still towered over these lands, this checkpoint was expecting to see a hundred scrap metal trucks cross in just one month. (We can’t know when exactly – part of the page was burned. The date was lost). Each lorry had to pay its due, the amounts spelled in black ink in an exclusive “pre-feasibility study” we photographed. In just one month, the 4th Division was planning to extract a total of roughly 125 million Syrian pounds [$9,615] from 100 scrap metal trucks en route to Lebanon.

For years, this unremarkable checkpoint quietly collected proof of a major export route for scrap pillaged by regime forces and its transfer to Lebanon. Scrupulous workers amassed records detailing the passage’s ins and outs. Most of them are lost in the arson. But the few pieces we were able to photograph provide insights into how Assad’s economic machine was moving metal scrap and other goods across the country. The documents also offer a rare glimpse into the hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue likely generated by this checkpoint. Some of the most recent records date back to September 2024.

On 10 April 2024, the Yafour Bridge checkpoint received a fax from another crossing. “For your information, no commercial convoy crossed the post.” Written in a few lines of black printed ink and signed twice, the headed notification passed from Colonel Louay Ahmad Habib, who was in charge of the Manbij crossing (also known as al-Tayhah crossing) between the regime and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), to Major-General Ghassan Bilal, Maher al-Assad’s right-hand man. Bilal is also on the EU and US sanctions lists for his affiliation with the Assad regime. By the time we found the document, he had likely already fled.

Documents we photographed confirm that scrap trucks, given their high value, were escorted by units of the 4th Division from the industrial centres of Hasiya, al-Matalla, and Adra across the border to Lebanon.

“They [i.e. the 4th Division] would give you permission to transport the materials to the factory. If you didn’t inform them, the vehicle, materials, and driver would be seized. This is the rule,” said a scrap reseller we talked to in Damascus.

According to the documents, the entity in charge of authorising the deployment of the 4th Division to escort scrap trucks was the Syrian Presidency’s General Secretariat, headed by Mansour Fadlallah Azzam, who is under Western sanctions for his role in the violent repression of the Syrian uprising. He was also Minister of Presidential Affairs between 2009 and 2023. The current whereabouts of Azzam are unknown.

Across the Syrian-Turkish border

The Masnaa passage isn’t the only corridor we were able to identify. Although to a lesser extent, evidence suggests that another crossing enabled metal scrap exports to Turkey.

Under a makeshift tent, nestled by mounds of grey waste and twisted metals that rest along the road connecting the small village of Killi with Idlib, in northern Syria, a collector we interviewed in a crowded scrapyard recounted the days during the war when larger players selling to Turkey would buy material from these very piles.

“This scrap iron comes from homes, and we buy it from local collectors” he explained. “The [local] iron companies buy it from us, export to Turkey, and also sell scrap within the liberated areas (i.e. areas under opposition control before Assad was toppled).” At a distance, young men press large chunks of iron scrap inside a deafening machine.

Turkey’s trade data indicate that, between 2021 and 2024, over 200 thousand tons of metal scrap entered the country from areas under rebel control in northern Syria. Most transited from the Bab al-Hawa border gate, which was manned by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the hardline Islamist paramilitary group which is leading the new Syrian administration.

The Idlib deputy governor, Qutaybah Khalaf, told TNA that, over the years, Turkey-bound scrap may have passed through the rebel-controlled border crossings. But he described this trade as “private work” that saw no involvement from local authorities.

However, experts do not discount the likelihood that entities loyal to the regime could have collaborated with opposition forces in facilitating the scrap trade.

“Even for the captagon trade, for example, there were some people inside opposition areas who were working with the 4th Division and Hezbollah,” said Ayman Aldassouky, a researcher at Syrian think tank Omran for Strategic Studies, who focussed on the 4th Division’s economic network.

Nonetheless, statistics show that only marginal amounts of scrap flowed to Turkey via Syria’s northern land crossings. Turkish customs data may capture just part of the trade, and the 4th Division may as well have used those routes to smuggle scrap directly. But inland roads were fraught with opposition factions, which likely made Lebanon the main route – an off-book trade some deny exists, given the lack of official records. Were it not for a small anomaly in those same data.

The Lebanon route: numbers don’t add up. 

There is no trace of the trucks loaded with metal scrap flowing in through the Masnaa crossing in Lebanese public statistics. Yet something may give it away: the quantity of scrap metal generated locally seems not to keep up with the export volumes listed in national and international statistics. An unregistered source of metal scrap, slipping through the border, could explain the irregularity.

Most Lebanese workers and companies we spoke to deny dealing directly with Syrian scrap, but it seems no secret that Lebanon is a corridor for this trade. A source from the city of  Baalbek – a known hub for smuggling, northeast of Beirut – with personal knowledge of these networks, reported they were offered Syrian steel for a construction project by a contractor once.

Antoine Srour, a scrapyard owner in Beirut, explained to TNA that, in the aftermath of the latest Israeli war on Lebanon, “metal from the South all went to traders from the South. And metal from Dahiyeh [i.e. Beirut’s southern suburbs] all went to traders down there, to Shatila in particular. […] Northerners […] profited from Syrian metal.” In early 2025, media reports  described residents of the marginalised northern area of Wadi Khaled, near illegal border crossings, complaining about convoys of trucks entering Syria loaded with cement, fuel, and other Lebanese goods, and returning with vegetables and scrap metal. Detection would be hard: smuggled goods are often mingled with Lebanese ones, said the anonymous source.

In the Bekaa valley, tribal networks smuggle anything that has value – weapons, drugs, and stolen goods – in collusion with Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shia Islamist political and military group.

The anonymous source doesn’t believe the traders who denied having dealt with Syrian smuggled metal scrap are telling the truth. Hezbollah has had longstanding ties to Assad.

“Now, after Bashar al-Assad’s fall, I’m not sure how things are – they’re still bringing in stuff and taking stuff out, but it’s not the same as it used to be,” commented the source, “back in the day, when Hezbollah was in Syria, […] if you had permission from Hezbollah, you could just walk in and out whenever the hell you wanted without even an ID.”

International sanctions made the use of ports for exports difficult in Syria, with only a handful of vessels permitted to dock, explained researcher Ayman Aldassouky. This turned Lebanon into the perfect backdoor for the regime, allowing it to save face while doing business with an enemy in war such as Turkey.

Scrap iron and steel are Lebanon’s fourth largest export. UN Comtrade statistics show that over 2 million tons of iron scrap have left Lebanese ports headed to Turkey since 2013. Part of this may have consisted of re-exports from areas under the Assad regime’s control in Syria. The main customers of Syrian scrap exported through Lebanon were reportedly Turkey, India, and the United Arab Emirates, Ayman Aldassouky told TNA.

The other part comes from local production. Here too, waste pickers are often minors, many are Syrians. After Israel’s latest war on Lebanon, districts hit by airstrikes are also turning into a source of scrap, according to locals we talked to and media reports. With no active steel recycling mills in the country, a large part of this locally collected scrap is recycled in Turkey.

The Lebanese Ministry of Economy and Trade did not provide comment to TNA in time for publication.

Scrap fleet

Iskenderun, southeast Turkey, is a city tailored to industry: the outer roads are jammed with trucks, factories and their piers flank the highway, and a smoky chimney is always fixed on the horizon. Here, bulk ships carrying scrap from war-torn countries have been docking at the steel companies’ private piers for years.

In the Turkish companies’ furnaces, where a soup of metals and alloys is cooked at around 1,600 °C, the trail of the iron scrap’s origins melts away. Turkey’s finished steel ends up all around the world. Major destinations include Spain, Greece, Italy and Romania, but also Yemen, Egypt, Morocco, and Iraq.

Based on data provided by MarineTraffic, a ship tracking and maritime analytics provider, TNA analysed tens of thousands of entries for bulk carriers docking at Turkey’s various ports. As none of the governments of the countries involved in this business would grant us detailed access to customs and trade data, we verified their cargo through satellite images obtained through Maxar and Planet. We could verify at least forty ships in 2023 alone: not only scrap-loaded ships sailing from Lebanon, but also vessels departing from ports in Libya, Russia, Ukraine and Israel/Palestine. In most of these countries, Turkish companies purchased scrap metal from both parties to the conflict.

What we identified is likely to be only the tip of this unknown trade, a fraction of the number of vessels whose tainted cargoes help bankroll conflict internationally.

Libya: rebuilding an army ‘scrap by scrap’ 

Following the toppling of the Gaddafi regime in 2011, Libya has been mired in conflict for around a decade. Despite the signing of a fragile ceasefire agreement in 2020, the country remains politically and militarily torn between two competing powers: the UN-recognised Government of National Unity (GNU) in the west and the so-called Libyan National Army (LNA) led by Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar in the east.

In mid-April 2023, a bulk carrier going by the name Nezha, approached the port of Benghazi in eastern Libya to fill its cargo with scrap. Two weeks later, it would unload the scrap at the Iskenderun pier of US-sanctioned MMK Metalurji, the Turkish subsidiary of Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works, a Russian steel manufacturer that ranks among the largest in the world. The Nezha was previously identified as having violated EU, US, and UK sanctions by docking at ports in Russian-occupied Crimea in 2019 and subsequently had its license revoked.

We sought comment from MMK Metalurji but received no response in time for publication.

In the last decade alone, Turkey imported over 3 million tons of scrap steel from Libya, according to UN Comtrade data – more than even petroleum.

Although official data do not specify which of the two rival authorities the exports derive from, satellite images show that in recent years one of the most active ports for loading scrap has been Benghazi, in Haftar’s zone of control – a confirmation of Turkey’s most recent rapprochement with the rulers of eastern Libya. All the while, Ankara continues to support the GNU in the west, both militarily and politically.

According to human rights’ groups and the UN, forces under Haftar’s control have committed “horrific crimes” – including torture, sexual violence, and forced labour – against Libyans and migrants alike. Forces under the GNU command have likewise been accused of gross human rights violations.

Experts highlight that scrap metal export revenues have helped fund the rearmament of General Haftar’s forces, as they fight against their rivals in the west of the country.

“They started […] in the mid-2010s. Haftar used the money from the scrap to rebuild his army. Used the scrap from war-devastated Benghazi. Then even when Turkey intervened against Haftar, [he] still continued selling his scrap to Turkey,” said Tarek Megerisi, a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Despite a Libyan ban on scrap exports, imposed to support domestic steel production, cargoes of steel waste continue sailing from all ports.

TNA reached out to the LNA as well as longtime spokesperson Lt Col Ahmed al-Mesmari for comment but they declined to respond.

All the ships loaded with metal scrap sailing from ports in Ukraine, Russia, Israel/Palestine, Lebanon and Libya that this investigation was able to identify, bear the risk of being associated with conflict financing and human rights violations.

European and Turkish companies downstream the supply of this trade cannot erase this risk either, explained Racionero Gomez from the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre. Directives from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and UN guiding principles set important benchmarks for companies, but even if corporate policies align with them, “their requirements and stringency vary a lot and one cannot fully trust standards blindly,” said Racionero Gomez, “we need to remember that the duty to protect human rights is on states, so we need regulations as well. We shouldn’t just put all the emphasis on standards.”

Rubble and mortar rounds with no end in sight

That day, Basel and Ahmad’s workday ended early – the sun was already setting over their rubble realm. They spent the remaining hours lingering unpredictably, waiting for the middlemen’s truck to come and pick up the scrap. But the truck would never come; the adults hid the bounty in a big hole, trusting no one would steal it before their return tomorrow.

All of them had small red veins in their eyes. From the 35-degree September sun, from the haze of dust rising from the rubble, or perhaps from the black smoke billowing from the bonfire lit to strip the plastic insulation from copper wires. “They’re more valuable like that,” they explained.

“Are there bombs here?”

“There’s plenty,” Ahmad quickly replied. He wanted to show us one, but we convinced him to desist. His uncle was digging and a rocket exploded on him, the families would later tell us.

Buyers would pay less for scrap originating from war zones, as there might be a chance that bombs and ammunition would show up in their load during inspections at border checks. There is no cheaper scrap than the Syrian one.

Our presence agitated the two kids. In the deserted yard shadowed by once-lively apartment complexes in a suburb of Damascus, they started playing with the shell of an improvised explosive device. With a twist of his arm, Basel threw it in a perfect arc two metres away, back into the rubble where it came from. Earlier that day, standing over a pile of rubble as kings, Basel and Ahmad had claimed proudly that they knew how to stay safe from war’s leftovers.

Assad or not, their lives haven’t changed much. They had been coming here since they were five or six, almost every day from dawn till dusk.

Ever since the HTS-led government has taken over, many of the men of Assad, involved in the scrap metal monopoly, have fled; some of them made deals with the new ruling forces and were reintegrated. The offices of the Syrian Minerals and Investment Company are open again, nestled in the industrial city of Adra. TNA contacted the company, seeking comment on their activities under the Assad regime and on whether scrap-related controls were introduced under the new administration. We received no response in time for publication.

Last June, the new rulers in Damascus imposed an export ban on scrap metal – now valuable for the country’s reconstruction – though it’s hard to say whether it will be respected: provisional statistics for 2025 reveal that minor exports of scrap have continued until a few months ago.

When contacted for comment, Syria’s Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour directed TNA to regional directorates for further information. Neither the Syrian Ministry of Finance nor the General Customs Directorate replied to our request for comment.

The people managing the scrap trade in Syria may change; Ahmad, Basel and their families will not. Tomorrow, they will still be here, together with the unexploded munitions, the broken cement, and the scrap for which they are paid only 500 Syrian pounds per kilo.

The post Metal scrap sourced from Syria and Libya’s wars fuel Turkey’s steel industry appeared first on SIRAJ.

Barely three days after admission to Al-Hikma hospital in the north-eastern Syrian city of Hasakah, Jihan took her last breath to the great astonishment of her family members.

Jihan’s husband, Yasser Mustafa, a man in his forties, could not believe the rapid deterioration in his wife’s condition: “She became sick so I took her to hospital, and on the next day doctors amputated her right foot after a gangrene infection, and then she died” he said in disbelief.

Mustafa tried to save her life by transferring her to the capital Damascus, only to find the doctors telling him “It is too late… there is no hope in saving her life.”

Jihan Mullah Ali was 33 years of age, and had previously taken up a job as a cleaner of operating rooms in the governmental National Hospital in Hasakah, in order to help her husband support their six children. For the next two years she would sterilise and clean operating rooms and doctors’ scalpels while collecting the remains (waste) of surgical operations in bags, according to her husband.

According to doctor Adel Sharif, “Jihan had Lupus, an auto-immune inflammatory disease that attacks the immune system of the body, and this was the reason for her gangrene.” Gangrene is a type of tissue death resultant from a shortage of blood supply or a serious bacterial infection. Sharif proceeds to explain that the nature of Jihan’s work and her exposure to medical waste and remains from operating rooms played a role in her infection.

The medical report on Jihan’s case reveals some further details of her condition: “Ms Jihan Mullah Ali undertook emergency surgery under general anesthesia because of gangrene in the lower-right part of her body as a result of an auto-immune condition (Lupus); she was subject to an endoscopy of her coagulated tissue in her leg and right thigh in the Al-Hikma hospital on the 29^th of October 2018, after which she died a from septic shock.”

Mohammad al-Darwish, a doctor specialising in internal disease, explains there are two main causes of Lupus: the first is genetic, the second environmental – the latter which can be spurred on by certain viruses and medications, which raises the likelihood that Jihan’s exposure to medical waste played a key role in her Lupus infection and subsequent death.

In addition to Jihan’s case, this investigation also documents the stories of five other men and women who work in hospitals and medical centres in north-east Syria, and who were infected with chronic and fatal diseases because of their unsafe exposure to medical waste.

This pattern has taken place amidst a failure by hospital cleaners to follow the preventative and safety procedures for dealing with medical waste, and in the absence of oversight and regulation from above.

Accordingly, the problem has been exacerbated by the failure of the hospitals examined in the investigation in the province of Hasakah to apply the safety procedures stipulated in the “national guide for the safe management of healthcare waste in Syria” relating to the collection, transport, storage and discharge of medical waste, which causes nurses and cleaners to handle the medical waste in the same way that they would ordinary rubbish (litter).

The investigation followed and documented the entire journey which medical waste undergoes, starting from its discharge from operating rooms to its placement in normal plastic bags, disposal in municipality garbage trucks and finally its transport to city outskirts where they are burned in a primitive fashion in random pits.

Furthermore, the detailed standards and criteria stipulated in the Syrian Health Ministry’s hospital guides (which stipulates the conditions for the establishment of hospitals before they are built) lack any mention of the need for a medical waste incinerator at the hospital.

According to Yunis Abu Zaid, who works in a medical laboratory in the city of Qamishli: “There are no warnings in public and private hospitals against the spread of certain diseases,” adding that “hospital cleaners are the most exposed to infection because they are less aware of preventative measures than doctors.”

For his part, Shirzad Yusuf, a specialist in general surgery in Qamishli, explains that infection is transmitted after a wound is contaminated by the substance present amongst the patient’s medical waste which carries the virus, adding that the infection rate in the city is high.

Unsafe exposure to medical waste

The World Health Organisation defines medical waste as “secondary products of healthcare that encompass sharp and non-sharp objects contaminated with blood, body parts, bodily tissue, chemical substances, pharmaceuticals and radioactive materials.”

WHO affirms that the poor management of health-care waste exposes healthcare workers, waste-handlers, patients and the general community to cases of infection and avoidable toxic effects and injuries.

During a few field visits to public and private hospitals especially in the province of Hasakah, researchers met with workers and doctors, all of whom affirmed the absence of medical incinerators either inside or outside these hospitals; the investigator also inspected and observed the mixing of different types of waste with each other, including sharp medical waste that causes injuries and transmits viruses.

According to Abu Zaid, “the disposal of medical equipment such as needles, scalpels, arterial catheters and laboratory glassware in a rubbish bin without abiding by the safety precautions can lead to injuries and infections being transmitted to patients,” while adding that it is necessary for every hospital to have an incinerator.

It should be noted that healthcare management in the north-eastern region of Jazira (encompassing the provinces of Raqqa, Hasakah, and Deir al-Zor east of the Euphrates) is split between the Syrian government – comprised in the Health Ministry – and the Kurdish-led ‘Autonomous Administration’, with both parties sharing authority in the aforementioned geographical expanse.

The co-president of the “Health Authority” of the Autonomous Administration in the city of Qamishli, Dr Abir Hassaf, admits the existence of a major problem because of the absence of medical waste incinerators, declaring: “The only incinerator is in the city of Derika (Al-Malikiyah), which was installed in 2018 with the aid of an international organization, and is only sufficient for the hospital in that area and the medical centres in its environment.” Hassaf adds that the price of an incinerator is $23,000 US Dollars – or more than 14 million Syrian Liras.

Hassaf justifies the absence of an incinerator by stating that the hospitals in question were built before the establishment of the Autonomous Administration, and therefore the Health Authority is not at fault for the absence of medical waste incinerators. Yet a field visit by the head of the investigation revealed that the eye and heart hospital in the city of Qamishli, managed by the Autonomous Administration’s Health Authority and which opened early on this year, also lacked a medical waste incinerator.

In February 2019, the investigation followed a municipality car collecting and transporting waste starting at Qamishli – after he received a tip that medical waste was disposed of alongside the ordinary rubbish which the car transported.

A cleaner in the ‘National Hospital’ in Hasakah told Raseef22 that medical waste, including bags of blood, empty and used syringes, body parts, soiled dressings and scalpels used in surgery were collected in specific bins placed in the hospital’s corridors, before the bins are emptied in a dumpster whose contents are then thrown in the back of municipality garbage trucks without wearing any gloves; the municipality’s cleaners than mix the medical waste with general waste inside the garbage truck. Finally, the waste is transported and incinerated.

The garbage truck’s journey ended in the ‘Nafkari’ landfill near the city of Qamishli, after having passed through several hospitals and medical centers to collect their medical waste, which is then piled up, accumulated and intermittently set on fire, so that the fire is not extinguished. Even after the combustion process was over, the investigator found the remnants of medical waste in the landfill, including catheters, vaccines and bottles of medication, amongst others.

From Cleaning the Nephrology Units to Kidney Failure

42-year old Wa’il al-Salem cleaned units at the nephrology department in al-Hasakah’s National Hospital  between the years 2015-2017. He would receive 70,000 Syrian Liras ($120 US Dollars) every month for his work in order to support his family of eight only to eventually succumb himself to kidney failure and lose his job.

“I used to clean the floors of the nephrology department in the hospital, and often collected waste without wearing medical gloves, while I sometimes wore [medical] face masks” al-Salem says.

After a period of time, Wa’il started to feel exhausted and was unable to go to work; he returned to the same hospital he worked in to undergo a medical examination, only to discover that his kidneys were failing and he additionally had high blood pressure and a calcium deficiency, according to the medical report examined by the investigator.

During the investigator’s meeting with Wa’il, he noticed that he appeared very weak and also had rashes on his skin, which meant that he had to undertake repeated dialysis sessions.

Wa’il explained that most of the rubbish which he collected as a cleaner in the nephrology department contained bags of serum, needles, soiled dressings and blood-soaked cotton.

Faisal Askar is a specialist in internal medicine; he believes that the country’s conditions following the outbreak of the Syrian war in 2011 led to a decline in health and cultural standards, and consequently to the appearance of certain septic diseases such as brucellosis, typhoid and hepatitis A, B and C – which often in turn led to patient dehydration and acute kidney failure, both in the general public and to those working in the medical field.

Askar called for the “necessity of reviewing the training of medical cadres to avoid any medical defects.

Lack of Prevention

Aisha Helal – 39 years-old – has worked as a cleaner in the emergency department in the National Hospital in Hasakah for the past three years. She earns a salary of 80,000 Liras ($150 US Dollars) monthly to support her special-needs husband and four children. However, as with others she began to suffer a severe difficulty in her breathing and a fast heart-beat during her work. She says that she has since spent 200,000 Liras on treatment.

Explaining how she contracted her illness, Helal said: “Every day I carry the bins that are filled with medical waste from the emergency department to the main rubbish containers in the hospital, and I clean the floors from medical waste and blood, needles and other things.” Helal goes on to confirm that she did not wear gloves or medical masks during her work, stating that she did not feel comfortable when doing so and never even tried it, despite their availability in the hospital.

According to Abdul Rahman Amin – Aisha’s doctor – the patient had a chronic allergy that was exacerbated when exposed to dust, cleaning substances and waste from surgical operations.”

As with the case of Aisha, most cleaners inside hospitals and medical centres do not wear precautionary gloves or masks, a reality also extending to the approximately 2,000 municipality cleaners who handle the waste outside of hospitals, according to Tariq Mohammad, who works in the Environmental Office in the Municipalities’ Committee in the Municipality of Qamishli.

These workers are often exposed to medical waste without taking any preventive or precautionary measures. The compiler of the investigation similarly found that municipality workers did not wear medical gloves designed to prevent the spread of viruses despite their availability in hospitals, and in the absence of any oversight or regulation that compels them to wear it.

We put these findings to the head of the Autonomous Administration’s Health Authority Hassaf, who responded: “Gloves are available in hospitals, and if they are not worn by cleaners then they are not following hygiene standards.” As regarding the municipality’s cleaners, Hassaf blamed the health department in the municipalities for not enforcing regulations on their workers.

No Vaccines, No Tests

Sulaiman Ahmed, a doctor in the province of Hasakah, stresses the need for workers to undergo medical tests before being accepted for work, in order to make sure that they were not infected by certain diseases, such as tuberculosis and hepatitis, noting that these are necessary tests because of their contagious nature which can be transmitted through blood or breathing.

As for the post-recruitment stage and how to deal with medical waste once inside work, Ahmad states that the workers are obligated to undertake a periodic test to check for communicable diseases, not least because of the fact that medical waste is contaminated with diseases – with various diseases being transmittable through needles, syringes and scalpels, and through piercings and wounds.

Ahmed stresses that hepatitis vaccines have to be taken over several intervals, in the event that a person did not have Hepatitis B. The first vaccine dose is followed by a second after a month, a third after six months and a fourth after four years – after which it is possible to take a supplementary supportive dose.

Through its co-president Abir Hassaf, the Autonomous Administration’s Health Authority admits that it has not conducted hepatitis tests for hospital workers, attributing the reason to the absence of vaccines – with the World Health Organization only providing the Syrian government, and not the Autonomous Administration, with vaccines as the only ‘recognised’ authority in Syria.

Hassaf clarified however that an understanding has since been reached with the World Health Organization by which vaccines would be provided; however, medical tests for workers have to be conducted before the immunisation can take place, a process which Hassaf says has so far not happened, alluding to the fault of local municipalities.

The head of the investigation attempted to reach the World Health Organisation on the 16^th and 28^thof March 2019 by email, in order to further examine the case and its findings, but did not receive a response up to the publication of the investigation.

Unenforced Laws

Amongst the most prominent reasons for the establishment of hospitals without medical waste incinerators is the failure to enforce the Syrian hygiene law which obligates the acquisition of these incinerators – the absence of which have led to most hospitals in the al-Jazira region dispose of medical waste in an unsafe manner.

Accordingly, the fifth chapter of the Syrian Hygiene Law (no. 49 for the year 2004) set out the mechanism for dealing with medical waste – however, this mechanism remains unenforced in the country’s north-east.

Article 23 of the law stipulates that owners of medical facilities have to segregate the different types of medical waste (non-hazardous from hazardous), with each labelled accordingly and placed in specific rubbish containers.

Article 24 of the law meanwhile obligated those transporting medical waste to not mix it with any other rubbish, and to subject it to hygienic and safe treatment; Article 25 delineates the need to provide cooling (refrigeration) units for the medical waste in the event that they are stored for 48 hours – a requirement which the investigation showed has not been followed.

As for the means of disposal, the Syrian Health Ministry stipulated six methods, the most important of which was to burn them at high temperatures in specific medical ovens.

It should be noted that the city of Qamishli contains 10 private hospitals and one public (governmental) hospital, as well as tens of medical centres, according to a chart published by the Syrian Health Ministry.

According to a 2015 report by the Roj Centre for the Protection of the Environment, hospitals leave behind almost two tons of medical waste every week, with a small hospital of 25 beds producing approximately 10 kilograms of waste.

Environmental Damage

The negative impacts of incinerating medical waste in landfills do not only encompass workers being infected with disease, but also includes the environment through the emissions produced by the unsafe incineration of medical waste.

According to Dilibirine Mohammad, a member of the board of trustees of the local Keskayi Organisation for the Protection of the Environment: “Dumping medical waste with general rubbish leads to the altering of the composition of the waste by changing its contents – thus transforming it from normal substances to toxic substances which are hazardous to both humans and the environment.”

Mohammad explains that the primitive incineration of medical waste releases a huge quantity of pollutants, including heavy metals such as arsenic, chromium, brass, mercury and lead which accumulate in drinking water, soil, plants and animal bodies – adding that the imbibing of high concentrations of these minerals by humans has toxic effects, especially lead and arsenic.

According to a 2018 study by the World Health Organisation titled “Healthcare waste”, the unsafe burning of medical waste and inappropriate substances leads to the release of pollutants into the atmosphere and the release of ash residue, explaining that the burnt substances that include PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), dioxins and furans are cancerous substances which have been linked to an assortment of damaging effects to human health.

The study further illustrated that medical waste landfills can poison drinking water if they are not safely constructed, stressing the need to use modern incinerators that operate at a high temperature ranging between 850°-1100°C, and equipped with special equipment to discharge gases safely; these alone fulfill international standards on dioxin and furan emissions, with the burning of medical waste constituting one of the main sources of dioxins, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Dioxin is the common name given to a group of 75 purely toxic chemicals which form from the combustion of waste that contains chlorine or through the production of products that contain chlorine.

Ultimately, despite it being more than a year since Jihan Mullah Ali’s passing, her husband still digs up her old pictures, reminiscing on their nine-month long engagement and the beautiful days they spent together. Today, Jihan’s husband worries about the future of his x children who were deprived early on in their lives from their mother’s care, who went from being a worker who helped people to survive with their lives to a victim that lost her life as a result of their medical waste.

*This investigation was accomplished with support from (SIRAJ), and under the supervision of  Ahmed Haj Hamdo. Published on Raseef22

The post Death From Human Waste in Syria’s Hospitals: an Investigation appeared first on SIRAJ.