Ground Zero Syria (Part 11): The Illegal Oil Wells of Deir ez-Zor

Deir ez-Zor, Syria's sixth-largest city, is also the country's oil capital. For four decades, the al-Assad regime (first run by Hafez, and now by his son Bashar) struck deals with Western oil companies like Shell and Total that resulted in the extraction of as much as 27,000 barrels of black gold from the sand every day. A pittance compared with other Middle Eastern countries' production, but it made Syria a bona fide oil-exporting nation. At least this was the case until international sanctions were imposed in 2011 in response to the regime's crackdown on the antigovernment protests, which quickly morphed into a civil war.

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Ground Zero Syria is a series where we've compiled photojournalist and videographer Robert King's footage into a series of raw, largely unedited vignettes that present a snapshot of the ancient city as it crumbles and burns while its citizens are killed indiscriminately.

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