The seeds, including samples of wheat, barley and grasses suited to dry regions, have been requested by researchers elsewhere in the Middle East to replace seeds in a gene bank near the Syrian city of Aleppo that has been damaged by the war.

And don’t worry, the ICARDA scientists will put the seeds to good use.

Although ICARDA’s home base in Aleppo has been maintained with a skeleton crew since it began winding down in 2012, it is not fully functional nor able to maintain its past role.

While the Norwegian minister has opted not to disclose the location to which the seeds are to be sent, the creator of Svalbard Global Seed Vault, Professor Cary Fowler, said in August that the center would reestablish its stocks in Morocco and Lebanon. But there are new deposits being made to the vault each year, so there’s no risk of the vault running out of seeds. Svalbard has been nicknamed “the Doomsday Vault” because it’s supposed to be the backup to the backup. “They have a safety duplicate collection here in Svalbard, which is a great thing because the area is in a state of war right now”, he says. It is known as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and is built to keep the seeds inside of it safe in any event – even if the power switched off, the bank itself could stay locked and frozen for another 200 years. But they left behind an important collection of drought-resistant seeds in cold storage.

It would be the first withdrawal from the vault, she said. “There’s seeds sitting on the same shelf from North Korea and South Korea, and they get along just fine up there”. It also has the more immediately practical function as a backup for smaller, regional seed vaults around the world. We have built this seed vault, in one way, it is our gift to the world.

The unceasing Syrian civil war has killed hundreds of thousands of people, displaced millions, and accelerated the rise of ISIS.

The requests marks the first time that seeds sent to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault have been returned to the sender for planting and harvesting.

ICARDA managed to move its headquarters from Syria in the early days of the war, while some of its workers remained at the gene bank in Aleppo in an attempt to save the collection.