the bigger problem is that turkey cut off a lot of water to syria as they damned the euphrates river.
even if they bring back syria’s refugees —they return to parched land because the same drought that struck israel in 2000 also struck syria.
the solution is to look to spain’s plastic green houses. its a billion dollar business. they use desalinated seawater because greenhouses use water so efficiently that desalinated water is economic for greenhouses.
there is still a lot of brackish water under syria. that combined with euphrates water would supply sufficient for a greenhouse culture in syria and provde a living for 1-3 million returnees.
They damned the euphrates?!? Those bastards! ;^) That had nothing to do with Syria’s practices. Damascus has a long history as a settlement in part because of a spring that has been flowing and not known to fail for thousands of years, but the output is a fraction of what the city now needs (not even considering the war consequences, pop moves etc). Syria cut off all natural water flow into Jordan, and as one of the earlier links said, part of the reason the Golan won’t leave Israeli control is the Litani River. Even Turkey is not water-rich by world standards, but has only just begun to capture more of its freshwater runoff, for instance. The less of the river water running into the Med and Black Seas, the better managed their problems will be, and that will mean more dams, not fewer.