Chef Jeremiah Langhorne starts diners at his restaurant The Dabney with house-made ciabatta bread. He turns this homey comfort into an exotic dish by adding a generous dusting of Aleppo pepper, an adobe red, large-flaked, native of its namesake city, Aleppo, Syria.

Like its ancestral home, the path the pepper takes from seed to plate has been tragically disrupted by war. And its presence in a Washington, D.C. restaurant shows both the complexity of the global spice trade, and the steadfastness of chile peppers.

In the last five years, with Syria’s exports unpredictable at best, many Syrian spice growers moved their operations north, across the border into Turkey, according to Christine Sahadi Whelan, who sources products for the Brooklyn-based food importer