28 Jun 2023
Parched communities, once displaced by the ravages of ISIL, can barely survive the decimation of their water supplies.
Rusool, 13, and his brother Waad, six, explore the cracked ground where there once was water in a village in the al-Ankour area of western Iraq [Alannah Travers/Al Jazeera]
Ramadi, Iraq – The most precious resource in the villages of al-Ankour is water, and it’s gone. Many of the area’s 13,000 residents want to leave but don’t have the means to escape.
A trace of toxic waste wafts from the edge of the lake, the stench of putrid water hitting long before it can be seen. In some parts of the village, salt-encrusted ground irritates the nose, the burning sun increasing the residue.
“We have no water, no electricity, no air conditioning,” shouts Abdulraheem Ismail, 44, in front of his mud-brick home in al-Ankour, south of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province in western Iraq, as the scorching midday heat reaches 40C (104F).
The villages worst impacted are on the south side of the lake, 40km (25 miles) from Ramadi.
An abandoned water purification tower, long out of use, looms to Ismail’s right.
The father of five has spent most of his life in al-Ankour, except for the period when the community fled to nearby displacement camps after the ISIL (ISIS) armed group captured the area. Although they returned in 2016, the current water crisis means most are now wondering where they can flee to this time.
About 30km (18.6 miles) farther east along the lake’s shore, a once popular resort town is also struggling as the water used to sustain thousands of people through fishing and tourism dries up.
Al Jazeera interviewed multiple residents who described the recent reduction in water as the most severe they have ever witnessed.
Nine months ago, due to the declining flow of the Euphrates River from neighbouring Syria, a barrage in Ramadi began redirecting the water away from the lake and towards Fallujah. Those who live around the lake were left with a dangerously reduced supply of water that formerly fed their villages.
Freshwater tankers sent by the local government two weeks ago are already dry. A well was dug recently in one village, but after reaching a depth of 86 metres (282 feet), it failed to strike water. Locals say they are reliant on plastic water bottles to sustain themselves.
Habbaniyah was built in the early 1980s as a water reservoir and tourist city during a short era of rapid development and financial prosperity in Iraq.
After the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, it fell into neglect and disorder, which was exacerbated in March 2015 when ISIL seized control of the area.
The Green Iraq Observatory, a local environmental organisation monitoring the situation, estimated in May that the 13,000 residents in the al-Ankour and al-Majar areas have been affected by shortages caused by redirection of water.
‘We would even accept being moved to Ukraine’, says former fisherman Firas Mohammed, 45, who was born in al-Ankour [Alannah Travers/Al Jazeera]
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30 Aug 2021
Disaster looms in Syria as Euphrates dwindles
Experts warn of an impending humanitarian catastrophe in northeast Syria, where waning river flow is rapidly waning.
Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/8/30/drying-euphrates-syria-disaster
Aid groups and engineers are warning of a looming humanitarian disaster in northeast Syria, where plummeting water levels at hydroelectric dams since January are threatening water and power supply for millions amid the coronavirus pandemic and economic crisis. [Delil Souleiman/AFP]
Syria’s longest river used to flow by his olive grove, but Khaled al-Khamees says it has now receded into the distance, parching his trees and leaving his family with hardly a drop to drink.
“It’s as if we were in the desert,” said the 50-year-old farmer, standing on what last year was the Euphrates riverbed.
“We’re thinking of leaving because there’s no water left to drink or irrigate the trees.”
Aid groups and engineers are warning of a looming humanitarian disaster in northeast Syria, where waning river flow is compounding woes after a decade of war.
They say plummeting water levels at hydroelectric dams since January are threatening water and power cutoffs for up to five million Syrians, in the middle of a coronavirus pandemic and economic crisis.
As drought grips the Mediterranean region, many in the Kurdish-held area are accusing neighbour and arch foe Turkey of weaponising water by tightening the tap upstream, though a Turkish source denied this.
Outside the village of Rumayleh where al-Khamees lives, black irrigation hoses lay in dusty coils after the river receded so far it became too expensive to operate the water pumps.
Instead, much closer to the water’s edge, al-Khamees and neighbours were busy planting corn and beans in the soil just last year submerged under the current.
The father of 12 said he had not seen the river so far away from the village in decades.
“The women have to walk 7km [4 miles] just to get a bucket of water for their children to drink,” he said.
Reputed to have once flown through the biblical Garden of Eden, the Euphrates runs for almost 2,800km (1,700 miles) across Turkey, Syria and Iraq.
In times of rain, it gushes into northern Syria through the Turkish border and flows diagonally across the war-torn country towards Iraq.
Along its way, it irrigates swaths of land in Syria’s breadbasket and runs through three hydroelectric dams that provide power and drinking water to millions.
But over the past eight months, the river has contracted to a sliver, sucking precious water out of reservoirs and increasing the risk of dam turbines grinding to a halt.
At the Tishrin Dam, the first into which the river falls in Syria, director Hammoud al-Hadiyyeen described an “alarming” drop in water levels not seen since the dam’s completion in 1999.
“It’s a humanitarian catastrophe,” he said.
Almost 90 percent of the Euphrates flow comes from Turkey, the United Nations says. To ensure Syria’s fair share, Turkey in 1987 agreed to allow an annual average of 500 cubic metres per second of water across its border. But that has dropped to as low as 200 in recent months, engineers claim. [Delil Souleiman/AFP]
A youth walks with a shovel near water pumps drawing water from Lake Assad in the village of Al-Tuwayhinah near the Tabqa Dam along the Euphrates River in Raqqa province, eastern Syria. [Delil Souleiman/AFP]
Five million people depend on the Euphrates for drinking water, but people are increasingly consuming unsafe water. [Delil Souleiman/AFP]
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TIGRIS-EUPHRATES RIVER SYSTEM
The Tigris–Euphrates river system is a large river system in Western Asia that discharges into the Persian Gulf. Its principal rivers are the Tigris and Euphrates, along with smaller tributaries.
From their sources and upper courses in the mountains of eastern Turkey, the rivers descend through valleys and gorges to the uplands of Syria and northern Iraq and then to the alluvial plain of central Iraq. Other tributaries join the Tigris from sources in the Zagros Mountains to the east. The rivers flow in a south-easterly direction through the central plain and combine at Al-Qurnah to form the Shatt al-Arab and discharge into the Persian Gulf. The rivers and their tributaries drain an area of 879,790 km2, including almost the entire area of Iraq as well as portions of Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Kuwait.
The region has historical importance as part of the Fertile Crescent region, where Mesopotamian civilization first emerged.
Geography
The Tigris–Euphrates Basin is shared between Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Kuwait. Many Tigris tributaries originate in Iran and a Tigris–Euphrates confluence forms part of the Iraq–Kuwait border. Since the 1960s and in the 1970s, when Turkey began the GAP project in earnest, water disputes have regularly occurred in addition to the associated dam’s effects on the environment. In addition, Syrian and Iranian dam construction has also contributed to political tension within the basin, particularly during drought.
The ecoregion is characterized by two large rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. The high mountains in the upper watershed receive more rain and snow than the lower watershed, which has a hot and arid subtropical climate. Annual snow melt from the mountains brings spring floods, and sustains permanent and seasonal marshes in the lowlands.
The plain between the two rivers is known as Mesopotamia. As part of the larger Fertile Crescent, it saw the earliest emergence of literate urban civilization in the Uruk period. For this reason, it is often described as a “Cradle of Civilization“.
There is a large floodplain in the lower basin where the Euphrates, Tigris, and Karun rivers converge to create the Mesopotamian Marshes, which include permanent lakes, marshes, and riparian forests. The hydrology of these vast marshes is extremely important to the ecology of the entire upper Persian Gulf.
Ecological threats
Iraq suffers from desertification and soil salination due in large part to thousands of years of agricultural activity. Water and plant life are sparse. Saddam Hussein‘s government water-control projects drained the inhabited marsh areas east of An Nasiriyah by drying up or diverting streams and rivers. Shi’a Muslims were displaced under the Ba’athist regime. The destruction of the natural habitat poses serious threats to the area’s wildlife populations. There are also inadequate supplies of potable water.
The marshlands were an extensive natural wetlands ecosystem, which developed over thousands of years in the Tigris–Euphrates basin and once covered 15–20,000 square kilometers. In the 1980s, this ecoregion was put in grave danger during the Iran–Iraq War. The Mesopotamian Marshes, which were inhabited by the Marsh Arabs, were almost completely drained. Although they had started to recover after the fall of Ba’athist Iraq in 2003, drought, intensive dam construction and irrigation schemes upstream have caused them to dry up once more. According to the United Nations Environmental Program and the AMAR Charitable Foundation, between 84% and 90% of the marshes have been destroyed since the 1970s. In 1994, 60 percent of the wetlands were destroyed by Hussein’s regime – drained to permit military access and greater political control of the native Marsh Arabs. Canals, dykes and dams were built routing the water of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers around the marshes, instead of allowing water to move slowly through the marshland. After part of the Euphrates was dried up due to re-routing its water to the sea, a dam was built so water could not back up from the Tigris and sustain the former marshland. Some marshlands were burned and pipes buried underground helped to carry away water for quicker drying.
The drying of the marshes led to the disappearance of the salt-tolerant vegetation; the plankton rich waters that fertilized surrounding soils; 52 native fish species; the wild boar, red fox, buffalo and water birds of the marsh habitat.
Climate change in Turkey and climate change in Iraq are also a threat.
Water dispute
The issue of water rights became a point of contention for Iraq, Turkey and Syria beginning in the 1960s when Turkey implemented a public-works project (the GAP project) aimed at harvesting the water from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers through the construction of 22 dams, for irrigation and hydroelectric energy purposes. Although the water dispute between Turkey and Syria was more problematic, the GAP project was also perceived as a threat by Iraq. The tension between Turkey and Iraq about the issue was increased by the effect of Syria and Turkey’s participation in the UN embargo against Iraq following the Gulf War. However, the issue had never become as significant as the water dispute between Turkey and Syria.
The 2008 drought in Iraq sparked new negotiations between Iraq and Turkey over trans-boundary river flows. Although the drought affected Turkey, Syria and Iran as well, Iraq complained regularly about reduced water flows. Iraq particularly complained about the Euphrates River because of the large amount of dams on the river. Turkey agreed to increase the flow several times, beyond its means in order to supply Iraq with extra water. Iraq has seen significant declines in water storage and crop yields because of the drought. To make matters worse, Iraq’s water infrastructure has suffered from years of conflict and neglect.
In 2008, Turkey, Iraq and Syria agreed to restart the Joint Trilateral Committee on water for the three nations for better water resources management. Turkey, Iraq and Syria signed a memorandum of understanding on September 3, 2009, in order to strengthen communication within the Tigris–Euphrates Basin and to develop joint water-flow-monitoring stations. On September 19, 2009, Turkey formally agreed to increase the flow of the Euphrates River to 450 to 500 m³/s, but only until October 20, 2009. In exchange, Iraq agreed to trade petroleum with Turkey and help curb Kurdish militant activity in their border region. One of Turkey’s last large GAP dams on the Tigris – the Ilisu Dam – is strongly opposed by Iraq and is the source of political strife.
