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3 years agoIn the Southwestern US tamarisk trees are a huge problem, they spread really fast along rivers and streams and their leaves have a lot of salt in them and shed constantly so they choke out native plant species. When I was a kid I used to play in the river a lot and I can remember tamarisk trees were the only thing that grew there, any other type of tree or plant was pretty much nonexistent. Luckily though there is a species of beetle that feeds on tamarisk and nothing else, they were brought in a few years ago to control the tamarisk population and they seem to be helping a ton. They cleared out all the dead tamarisk trees and now the riverbanks are filled with cottonwoods, willows, and reeds, it’s really nice to see.
Occasionally I read news sites based in Rojava and I feel like one thing that some leftists don’t understand is that a lot of the people in that region legitimately hate Assad and the Syrian Government, so accepting the return of the Syrian government would have been a very bitter pill for people to swallow. Not only was the Syrian government discriminatory towards Kurds and treated Northeast Syria as an internal colony, but apparently it was also just incompetent, corrupt, and centralized to such an insane degree that municipalities were incapable of maintaining themselves properly.