Will Syrian Latakia return? Or is it gone for good?

A good question and two questions in response - do you think political stability will return to Syria? Will the skill and knowledge needed to produce traditional Syrian latakia still be present?

The Syrian war has nothing to do with the demise of Syrian Latakia. If you believe the constant cut-n-paste jobs from the internet you would be led to believe the supply dried up from a ban on using the wood for making it. Do you really think a 3rd world country would be so concerned about their environment that they would ban the harvesting of wood? If you look into tobacco export/import documents you will see the demand from major tobacco companies dried up in about the 70's. Once that happened the farmers had to find other ways to make a living. Now the experts are all gone. I don't think they could start making it again even if they wanted to.

This is the first time I've heard a religious component being used to explain the extinction of Syrian Latakia, or about the market drying up in the 70s. I'd be interested to so see some reliable sources on these claims. I also don't think "3rd world countries" by definition do not care about their environment. This is the best article I've seen:

dutchpipesmoker.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/syrian-latakia/

Apparently some farmers in Turkey (where most "Cyprian" tobacco is allegedly grown) are experimenting with leaf-smoking techniques to try to replicate Syrian Lat. That was a reliable source, though it would take me a while to hunt it down. Some kind of NGO website item, I think.

   Supposedly McC and Dunhill had hundreds of pounds of Syrian Latakia from the 70’s in storage.....when it was plentiful. Personally, I believe since the mid 70’s Syrian Latakia has not been grown, who really knows what stockpile of Syrian Latakia really was available here in the States. 

Yes, thank you, this is the kind of information I was looking for.  Do oyu have a link?  I cannot find anything on google.

I didn't mean for this to be a political/religious thread.  As lonecoyote probably knows from doing foreign affairs work, especially in Western Asia and the "mideast", different ethnicities and religious minorities are involved in certain trades of their own, its part of their culture. 

We see this even in Western culture, I am sure that Legend knows ALL the stories about Irish traveller/pikey craftsman, handymen, and woodworkers. 

I've heard (but don't know for sure) that many of the Syrians who were involved in growing tobacco were Christian minorities.  That is not terribly important, but would explain how it suddenly vanished from blends during the civil war.

From my more recent reading, though, it appears that the farming of Syrian Latakia ended for good in the mid-to-late 1990s, and that was when Mac Baren (and McClelland, C&D, GL Pease) bought their last batch. C&D and GL Pease had their wares of Syrian in a storage facility that was laid to waste by fire.  Lots of good tobacco lost in that fire, apparently.  What a tragedy.

This is actually one of the reasons I like this hobby.  Its such a tiny nook thesedays that a lot of what we read/hear is simply pipe lore, local legend, gossip, and banter amongt pipe smokers.  I figure you can maybe believe 15-20% of what is said to be true, the rest are stories made up by old men.  Which I actually find entertaining to some degree. 

I imagine we must be grateful for the Cyprian Latakia and the Syrian Blends folks have.