Israel and America's war on Iran, barely a fortnight old, is already unfolding as an environmental outrage.
The choking smoke and the black acid rain that fell from the skies after last Sunday's attacks on Tehran's fuel depots, followed by Iran's retaliatory bombings of fuel tankers in the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday, were just the most visible aspects of the environmental crimes perpetrated during the war’s first two weeks.
“There will be a real cocktail of chemistry, including significant amounts of aromatic compounds that are known to interact with DNA and have been linked to cancers,” University of London chemist Andrea Sella told me for my story in the Guardian, in reference to the Tehran bombing.
Affected sites elsewhere will be no better, with clouds of heavy metals, volatile chemicals, and fine particulate matter kicked up by every explosion. “We can anticipate a lingering legacy of respiratory and other illnesses into the future,” Sella added.
Alongside the more than 2,000 people so far killed by attacks in Iran, Lebanon, and around the region—with many more injured and hundreds of thousands displaced—war monitors have tracked hundreds of incidents of environmental harm.
Iran has borne the brunt of it. One monitor collating information from the UN Environment Program said that out of 600 incidents they’d thus far identified, 500 were in the Islamic Republic. But across the Persian Gulf, delicate oil infrastructure was coming under attack from Iranian drones. Greenpeace issued a warning on Thursday that more than 5.5 billion gallons of oil afloat in tankers was a "disaster waiting to happen."
Even before the war began, the region—whose economies rely almost entirely on polluting oil and gas extraction—stood on an environmental precipice: deeply water stressed, ecologically devastated, and disproportionately affected by rising temperatures caused by climate breakdown.
And even after the fighting stops, and people begin to rebuild their homes and their lives, they will be heirs to a toxic legacy that will affect them for years—even generations—to come.
—Damien Gayle
