The Euphrates & the Northeast

The Euphrates and its tributary the Khabur made the east a corridor between Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean from the earliest times. Mari, on the river near today's Iraqi border, was a rich city-state in the third and second millennia BC until Hammurabi of Babylon destroyed it in the 18th century BC; its palace archive of tablets is one of the great sources for the period. In the Jazira, tells such as Tell Brak, Tell Halaf and Tell Leilan mark early cities and the Hurrian and Aramaean kingdoms that followed.

Dura-Europos was founded by the Seleucids around 300 BC, became a Roman garrison town facing Parthia and then Persia, and was abandoned after a Sasanian siege in the 250s, preserving its buildings under sand. The Byzantines fortified Resafa, the Umayyads built palaces in the steppe, and the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur founded al-Rafiqa beside Raqqa, where Harun al-Rashid kept his court in the 790s and 800s. Mongol invasions ruined the valley, and for centuries it belonged mostly to Bedouin tribes.

Under late Ottoman rule Deir ez-Zor became the centre of a district, and in 1915–16 its desert became the end point and killing ground of the Armenian deportations. The French mandate brought Assyrian refugees to the Khabur in the 1930s and the Tabqa Dam created Lake Assad in the 1970s. In the civil war ISIS made Raqqa its capital in 2014, and Kurdish-led forces backed by a US-led coalition took the city in 2017, leaving it largely destroyed; ISIS lost its last territory at Baghuz, near the Iraqi border, in 2019.

The Euphrates valley is Arab tribal country, where large confederations such as the Uqaidat and the Baggara shape politics, marriages and the settling of disputes. The Jazira around Qamishli and Hasakah is the most mixed part of Syria: Kurds, who are the majority in many northern districts, Arab tribes, Assyrian and Syriac Christians, Armenians, and small Yazidi and Chechen communities.

Kurdish identity was suppressed under the Baʿath state — many Kurds were left without citizenship after a 1962 census — and from 2012 a Kurdish-led autonomous administration governed much of the northeast, teaching in Kurdish and promoting women's participation in public life and in its armed forces. After a government offensive in January 2026 most of its territory passed to Damascus, and the administration was formally integrated into the Syrian state in August 2026. Newroz, the spring new year, is the great Kurdish festival, marked with bonfires and dancing on 21 March.

Tribal hospitality is taken seriously: the guest tent or reception room, bitter coffee poured from a long-spouted pot, and a meal of rice and lamb for honoured visitors. The Assyrian villages of the Khabur keep Syriac church traditions, though many families have emigrated.

Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor were both sizeable cities before the war, and both are still being cleared and rebuilt, much of it by residents themselves. Hasakah and Qamishli, the latter on the Turkish border, are the main towns of the Jazira, and camps such as al-Hol held tens of thousands of people linked to ISIS fighters in the years after its defeat.

This is Syria's breadbasket and oil field. The Jazira grows much of the country's wheat and cotton, the Euphrates valley farms irrigated land, and the oil and gas fields east of the river produced much of Syria's output before the war. Drought, falling river levels and dams upstream in Turkey have hurt farming, and the oil revenues have long been contested.

Days start early to avoid the heat, with markets and field work in the morning and families gathering in courtyards and on roofs after dark. Clearing rubble and mines, restoring water and power, the fate of detainees and camps, and the future of local government are the issues that dominate.

Food in the east is plainer and closer to that of Iraq and the Bedouin than to the cities of the west. Feasts centre on lamb or mutton cooked in large pots and served on rice or on layers of bread soaked in broth, eaten from a shared tray, and guests are fed first. Flatbread is baked on the wall of a clay tannour oven, and dairy from sheep and goats comes as laban (yoghurt), samneh (clarified butter) and dried kishk.

The Euphrates supplies carp and other river fish, grilled over wood by the water. In spring after good rains the desert gives kama, desert truffles, sold by the kilo in the markets and cooked with meat or rice. Kurdish households in the Jazira make bulgur dishes, stuffed vegetables and dumplings, and Assyrian families bake festive breads and pastries for Easter.

Wheat from the Jazira goes into burghul and freekeh, and melons, tomatoes and cucumbers from the river gardens fill summer markets. Tea, strong and very sweet, is drunk all day, and bitter Bedouin coffee with cardamom marks every formal visit.

The Euphrates is the region's backbone, a green ribbon of fields and poplars through desert. In Raqqa province, the Tabqa Dam holds back Lake Assad, with the castle of Qal'at Ja'bar on its hill above the water; Raqqa itself keeps stretches of its Abbasid walls, the Baghdad Gate and the remains of the Qasr al-Banat palace; and south of the river lies Resafa, a walled city with the ruined basilicas of Saint Sergius.

Downstream, Deir ez-Zor is known for its river corniche and the suspension bridge of the French era, destroyed in the war; the Byzantine fortress of Halabiye guards a narrow stretch of the valley upstream. Towards the Iraqi border lie Dura-Europos, on its cliff above the river, whose synagogue paintings are now in the National Museum of Damascus, and Mari at Tell Hariri, with the remains of the palace of Zimri-Lim. Both sites were heavily looted during the war.

North, the Khabur river crosses the Jazira plains around Hasakah, a flat land of wheat fields dotted with tells, including Tell Brak, Tell Halaf and Tell Leilan, and the Assyrian villages along the river.