Water Politics in the Land of Two Rivers

[polly7]

By Joris Leverink
Source: teleSUR English
May 23, 2015

Mesopotamia, the ‘Land of Two Rivers’, cradle of modern civilization and currently home to probably as many conflicts as there are ethnic groups, religious factions and nation states. Rebels fighting states; Sunnis battling Shias; Turks clashing with Kurds; jihadists massacring local villagers; environmental activists against national governments and states competing with one another for the region’s natural resources.

Where oil is widely considered as one of the main causes for the region’s instability – mainly because it drew imperialist powers to the region that eagerly supported local dictators in order to ensure continued and unlimited access to the precious substance – another potential source of conflict is often overlooked. Water, the first and foremost source of life in the barren desert regions of the Middle East, which allowed for the world’s first civilizations to develop on the fertile floodplains between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, is getting ever more scarce and the struggles to safeguard a fare share are growing fiercer by the day.

Water flows. From the mountains to the seas. Oblivious to national borders, local conflicts and the religious, ethnic and ideological backgrounds of the people who populate its banks. Rivers that sprout in one country quench thirst in another, and as such, per definition they play in important role in the relations between the countries whose borders they so easily cross.

On several occasions over the past decades have local development projects on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers brought the three neighboring states, Turkey, Syria and Iraq, to the brink of war. When in 1990 Turkey blocked the flow of the Euphrates for nine days to fill the reservoir of the Atatürk dam Iraq massed troops on its border and threatened to bomb the dam. Nowadays, tensions remain high as yet another Turkish mega-dam is about to be completed – the Ilisu dam on the Tigris river – which will severely reduce the water flow to Iraq and destroy thousands of years of cultural and historical heritage at home.

Water is cause for conflict in many instances, but it also has the potential to bring communities together to built the necessary foundations for lasting peace in the Middle East. ..........

Full article: https://zcomm.org/zcommentary/water-politics-in-the-land-of-two-rivers/


Why global water shortages pose threat of terror and war

From California to the Middle East, huge areas of the world are drying up and a billion people have no access to safe drinking water. US intelligence is warning of the dangers of shrinking resources and experts say the world is 'standing on a precipice'


An Egyptian farmer shows the dryness of the land due to drought in a farm formerly irrigated by the river Nile. Photograph: Mohamed Abd El Ghany

Already a billion people, or one in seven people on the planet, lack access to safe drinking water. Britain, of course, is currently at the other extreme. Great swaths of the country are drowning in misery, after a series of Atlantic storms off the south-western coast. But that too is part of the picture that has been coming into sharper focus over 12 years of the Grace satellite record. Countries at northern latitudes and in the tropics are getting wetter. But those countries at mid-latitude are running increasingly low on water.

"What we see is very much a picture of the wet areas of the Earth getting wetter," Famiglietti said. "Those would be the high latitudes like the Arctic and the lower latitudes like the tropics. The middle latitudes in between, those are already the arid and semi-arid parts of the world and they are getting drier."

On the satellite images the biggest losses were denoted by red hotspots, he said. And those red spots largely matched the locations of groundwater reserves.

"Almost all of those red hotspots correspond to major aquifers of the world. What Grace shows us is that groundwater depletion is happening at a very rapid rate in almost all of the major aquifers in the arid and semi-arid parts of the world."

"Are we just going to plunge into this next epic drought and tremendous, never-before-seen rates of groundwater depletion, or are we going to buckle down and start thinking of managing critical reserve for the long term? We are standing on a precipice here."

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/09/global-water-shortages-threat-terror-war