Article and Summary: Iraq's once mighty river drying up.Straits Times, July 15, 2009.

July 15, 2009 Straits Times 2009


Iraq's once mighty river drying up

Water misuse, drought and neighbours' dams causing Euphrates crisis

JUBAISH (IRAQ): Throughout the marshes, the reed gatherers, standing on land they once floated over, cry out to visitors in a passing boat.

'Maaku mai!' they shout, holding up their rusty sickles. 'There is no water!'

The Euphrates is drying up. Strangled by the water policies of Iraq's neighbours Turkey and Syria, a two-year drought, and years of misuse by Iraq and its farmers, the river is significantly smaller than it was just a few years ago. Some officials worry that it could soon be half of what it is now.

The shrinking of the Euphrates, a river so crucial to the birth of civilisation that the Book of Revelation prophesied its drying up as a sign of the end times, has decimated farms along its banks, left fishermen impoverished and depleted riverside towns as farmers flee to the cities looking for work.

The poor suffer more acutely, but all strata of society are feeling the effects: sheikhs, diplomats and even Members of Parliament who retreat to their farms after weeks in Baghdad.

Along the river, rice and wheat fields have turned into baked dirt. Canals have dwindled to shallow streams and fishing boats sit on dry land. Pumps that are meant to feed water treatment plants dangle pointlessly over brown puddles.

'The old men say it's the worst they remember,' said Mr Sayid Diyia, a 34-year-old fisherman in Hindiya, sitting in a riverside cafe full of his idle colleagues. 'I'm depending on God's blessings.'

The drought is widespread in Iraq. For two years, rainfall has been far below normal, leaving the reservoirs dry, and United States officials predict that wheat and barley output will be a little over half of what it was two years ago.

It is a crisis that threatens the roots of Iraq's identity, not only as the land between two rivers but also as a nation that was once the largest exporter of dates in the world, that once supplied German beer with barley, and that takes patriotic pride in its expensive Anbar rice.

Now Iraq is importing more and more grain.

Droughts are not rare in Iraq, though officials say they have been more frequent in recent years. But drought is only part of what is choking the Euphrates and its larger, healthier twin, the Tigris.

The most frequently cited culprits are the Turkish and Syrian governments. Iraq has plenty of water, but it is a downstream country.

There are at least seven dams on the Euphrates in Turkey and Syria, according to Iraqi water officials, and with no treaties or agreements, the Iraqi government is reduced to begging its neighbours for water.

With the Euphrates showing few signs of increasing health, bitterness over Iraq's water threatens to be a source of tension for months or even years to come between Iraq and its neighbours.

Many US, Turkish and even Iraqi officials, disregarding the accusations as election-year posturing, say the real problem lies in Iraq's own deplorable water management policies.

'There used to be water everywhere,' said Mr Abduredha Joda, 40, sitting in his reed hut on a dry, rocky plot of land outside Karbala.

Mr Joda fled to Baghdad when Saddam Hussein drained the great marshes of southern Iraq in retaliation for the 1991 Shi'ite uprising.

He moved to Karbala in 2004 to fish and raise water buffaloes in the lush wetlands there that remind him of his home. 'This year, it's just a desert,' he said.

Officials say nothing will improve if Iraq does not seriously address its own water policies and its history of flawed water management.

Leaky canals and wasteful irrigation practices squander the water, and poor drainage leaves fields so salty from evaporated water that women and children dredge huge white mounds from sitting pools of runoff.

The farmers, reed gatherers and buffalo herders keep working, but they say they cannot continue if the water stays like this.

'Next winter will be the final chance,' said Mr Hashem Hilead Shehi, a 73-year-old farmer who lives in a bone-dry village west of the marshes. 'If we are not able to plant, then all of the families will leave.'

NEW YORK TIMES


Summary Question
Read the newspaper report .
Summarise the causes and effects of the drying up of the Euphrates River.