ALBU JUMAA, Iraq – Every school-age child learns the name: Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of civilization.
Today much of that land is turning to dust.
The word Mesopotamia means the land between rivers. It is where the wheel was invented, irrigation flourished, and the first known writing system arose. Some experts say that the rivers here fed the legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon and converged on the Biblical Garden of Eden.
Now, in some villages near the Euphrates River, there is so little water left that families are dismantling their houses, brick by brick, piling them on trucks and driving away.
“You wouldn’t believe it if I say it now, but this was a place of water,” said Sheikh Adnan al Sahlani, a science teacher in southern Iraq near Naseriyah.
Today “nowhere is there water,” he said. All who remain are “suffering a slow death.”
Until well into the 20th century, the southern city of Basra, Iraq, was known as the Venice of the East for its canals, crisscrossed with gondola-like boats that roamed the neighborhoods.
And for much of its history, the Fertile Crescent—often defined as an area that includes swathes of present-day Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Iran, the West Bank, and Gaza—had no shortage of water, inspiring centuries of artists and writers who portrayed the region as an ancient and lush land. Spring floods were common and rice, one of the most water-intensive crops, was cultivated for more than 2,000 years.
But now nearly 40 percent of Iraq has been encroached upon by desert sands that claim thousands upon thousands of acres of arable land every year.
Scientists say climate change and desertification are to blame. So are weak governance and reliance on wasteful irrigation techniques that date back millennia, to Sumerian times.
Another culprit is common globally: a growing population whose demands for water continue to rise, both because of their sheer numbers and, in many places, because of higher living standards.
In Iraq, the fallout is depleting society, sparking deadly clashes between villages, displacing thousands of people every year, emboldening extremists and leaving more and more land looking like a barren moonscape.
Drained and dirty rivers and groundwater are causing outbreaks of cholera, typhoid and hepatitis A. Rivers and canals have receded so low that Islamic State militants easily cross them to attack villages and security posts, and fish farmers have threatened government regulators who have tried to close them for violating water restrictions.
In many areas, the water pumped from below the surface is too salty to drink, a result of water scarcity, agricultural runoff, and untreated waste. “Even my cows don’t drink it,” said one farmer.
Iraq and its neighbors offer a warning to the rest of the Middle East and other parts of the world.
“It’s one of the first places to show some kind of extreme death, literally, from climate change.”said Charles Iceland, director of water security at the World Resources Institute.
Iraqis’ water comes from the government in red plastic barrels, about 600 liters per month per family. Even when used sparingly, it barely lasts a week in the heat, said Sahlani, who lives in the village of Albu Jumaa.
As late as the 1970s and 1980s, Iraq built dams and artificial lakes to contain the huge overflow of winter rains and snowmelt from the Taurus Mountains, the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
Its water still feeds the trees along the narrow banks, with strips of green fields on either side. But even those stripes have shrunk in recent decades.
Since 1974, Turkey has built 22 dams, hydroelectric plants, and irrigation projects on the Tigris and Euphrates.
In the early 2000s, Iran began building more than a dozen smaller dams and tunnels on tributaries of the Tigris, devastating Iraqi provinces like Diyala, known just 10 years ago for its peaches, apricots, oranges and dates. Tributaries from Iran are the only source of water in the province, apart from dwindling rainfall.
Water flowing into Iraq has decreased by nearly 50 percent on the Euphrates and about a third on the Tigris since construction of large dams began in the 1970s, Iraq’s Water Ministry says.
For generations, Hashem al-Kinani and his family farmed 8 hectares east of Baghdad, on the Diyala border, facing one trial after another.
First, the US invasion and the departure of Saddam Hussein affected state support for farmers. Then, in 2006, al Qaeda killed many local men. Rainfall has become more erratic and lessened, and as Iranian dams have been built, river water has become too scarce to grow fruit.
The countries of the world share some 900 rivers, lakes and aquifers, according to the UN, and although there is a treaty to regulate their use, less than half of the countries have ratified it.
In 2021, Iraq threatened to take Iran to the International Court of Justice for taking away its water. But the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government, close to Tehran’s rulers, dropped the matter.
Now the water flowing into eastern Iraq has been reduced so much that the floodplains have turned into parched fields.
Iraq’s growth has added to the tension: its population has skyrocketed from 11.6 million in 1975 to more than 44 million today.
Pleas for Turkey to share more water have largely gone unheeded. In the summer of 2022, at the height of the drought, the Turkish Ambassador to Iraq responded to the requests by complaining that Iraqis were “wasting” water and calling on the Iraqi government to enact “immediate measures to reduce waste.” This year, when a similar request came through, Turkey shared more water for a month before cutting back.
Fixing Iraq’s outdated farming techniques — which waste up to 70 percent of the water used for irrigation, finds a study conducted for Iraq’s Water Ministry — is paramount. But convincing farmers to change has been slow.
Thirty years ago, the village of Al Najim had 5,000 inhabitants. Today there are 80 left. The temperature recently was around 50 degrees Celsius. Sheikh Muhammad Ajil Falghus, head of the Najim tribe, was born in the village. “The soil was good,” he explained. Until the early 2000s, he said, “we grew wheat and barley, corn and clover.” Now all that grows are small clumps of tamarisk planted as a barrier against windblown sand.
“Now we live on the edge of life,” the sheikh said. “There is no agriculture anymore, it is no longer possible to sow. This is the end of the road, the end of life. We expect a solution from God or from good people”.
BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/29/world/middleeast/iraq-water-crisis-desertification.html, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-08-24 22:00:07
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