The outcome of the Iraq and Syria conflicts may rest on who controls the region’s dwindling water supplies, security analysts in London and Baghdad say.
Rivers, canals, dams, sewage and desalination plants are now all military targets in the semi-arid region that regularly experiences extreme water shortages, Qatar’s Royal United Services Institute think tank deputy director Michael Stephen said from Baghdad.
“Control of water supplies gives strategic control over both cities and countryside. We are seeing a battle for control of water. Water is now the major strategic objective of all groups in Iraq. It’s life or death,” he said. “If you control water in Iraq, you have a grip on Baghdad and you can cause major problems. Water is essential in this conflict.”
The Islamic rebel group the Islamic State of Iraq (ISIS) now controls most of the key upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the two great waterways that flow from Turkey in the north to the Persian Gulf in the south and on which all Iraq and much of Syria depends for food, water and industry.
“Rebel forces are targeting water installations to cut off supplies to the largely Shiite south of Iraq,” said Matthew Machowski, a Middle East security researcher at the British houses of parliament and Queen Mary University of London.
“It is already being used as an instrument of war by all sides. One could claim that controlling water resources in Iraq is even more important than controlling the oil refineries, especially in summer,” he said. “Control of the water supply is fundamentally important. Cut it off and you create great sanitation and health crises.”
ISIS now controls the Samarra barrage west of Baghdad on the Tigris River and areas around the giant Mosul Dam, higher up on the river. Because much of the Kurdistani region depends on the dam, it is strongly defended by Kurdish peshmerga forces and is unlikely to fall without a fierce fight, Machowski said.
A week ago, Iraqi troops were rushed to defend the massive 8km-long Haditha Dam and its hydroelectrical works on the Euphrates to stop it falling into the hands of ISIS forces. Were the dam to fall, analysts say the militant group would control much of Iraq’s electricity and the rebels might fatally tighten their grip on Baghdad.
Securing the Haditha Dam was one of the first objectives of the US special forces invading Iraq in 2003. The fear was that then-Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s forces could turn the structure that supplies 30 percent of the country’s electricity into a weapon of mass destruction, by opening the lock gates that control the flow of the river. Billions of gallons of water could have been released, power to the capital would have been cut off, towns and villages over hundreds of square kilometers flooded and the country would have been paralyzed.
In April, ISIS fighters in Fallujah captured the smaller Nuaimiyah Dam on the Euphrates and deliberately diverted its water to “drown” government forces in the surrounding area. Millions of people in the cities of Karbala, Najaf, Babylon and Nasiriyah had their water cut off, but the town of Abu Ghraib was catastrophically flooded, along with farms and villages more than 518km2. According to the UN, about 12,000 families lost their homes.
Earlier this year, Kurdish forces reportedly diverted water supplies from the Mosul Dam. Equally, Turkey has been accused of reducing flows to the giant Lake Assad — Syria’s largest body of fresh water — to cut off supplies to Aleppo, and ISIS forces have reportedly targeted water supplies in the refugee camps set up for internally displaced people.
Iraqis fled from Mosul after ISIS cut off power and water and only returned when they were restored, Machowski said.
“When they restored water supplies to Mosul, the Sunnis saw it as liberation. Control of water resources in the Mosul area is one reason why people returned,” he added.
Increasing temperatures, one of the longest and most severe droughts in 50 years and the steady drying up of farmland as rainfall diminishes have been identified as factors in the political destabilization of Syria.
Both ISIS forces and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s army are said to have used water tactics to control the city of Aleppo. The Tishrin Dam on the Euphrates, about 96km east of the city, was captured by the extremist group in November 2012.
The use of water as a tactical weapon has been used widely by both ISIS and Damascus, Chatham House researcher Nouar Shamout said.
“Syria’s essential services are on the brink of collapse under the burden of continuous assault on critical water infrastructure. The stranglehold of ISIS, neglect by the [Syrian] regime and an eighth summer of drought may combine to create a water and food crisis which would escalate fatalities and migration rates in the country’s ongoing three-year conflict,” he said.
“The deliberate targeting of water supply networks ... is now a daily occurrence in the conflict. The water pumping station in al-Khafsah, Aleppo, stopped working on May 10, cutting off [the] water supply to half of the city. It is unclear who was responsible; both the regime and opposition forces blame each other, but unsurprisingly, in a city home to almost 3 million people, the incident caused panic and chaos. Some people even resorted to drinking from puddles in the streets,” he said.
Water will now be the key to who controls Iraq in future, former US intelligence officer Jennifer Dyer said on US television last week.
“If ISIS has any hope of establishing itself on territory, it has to control some water. In arid Iraq, water and lines of strategic approach are the same thing,” she said.
The Euphrates River — the Middle East’s second-longest river — and the Tigris have historically been at the center of conflict. In the 1980s, Hussein drained 90 percent of the vast Mesopotamian marshes that were fed by the two rivers to punish the Shiites who rose up against his regime.
Since 1975, Turkey’s dam and hydropower constructions on the two rivers have cut water flow to Iraq by 80 percent and to Syria by 40 percent. Both Damascus and Baghdad have accused Ankara of hoarding water and threatening their water supply.
“There has never been an outright war over water, but water has played extremely important role in many Middle East conflicts. Control of water supply is crucial,” Stephen said, adding that it could also be an insurmountable problem should Iraq split into three.
“Water is one of the most dangerous problems in Iraq. If the country was split there would definitely be a war over water. Nobody wants to talk about that,” he said.
Some academics have suggested that Tigris and Euphrates will not reach the sea by 2040 if rainfall continues to decrease at its present rate.
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