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Iraq Faces Sectarian Wars Over Water

BAGHDAD, Iraq (OOSKAnews Correspondent) 6th February 2012, 01.56  — As if war-ravaged Iraq did not have enough problems, it is facing worsening water shortages that observers fear could trigger sectarian conflict. The shortages are the result of the failure of successive postwar governments to ensure water supplies as well as by extensive dam-building in neighboring states.

International aid organizations recently have reported an increase in violent incidents concerning water supply.

 This is happening against a worrying backdrop of mounting sectarian violence between Iraq’s majority Shiites, who dominate the government and security forces, and the minority Sunnis who lost power when Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship was toppled after the U.S. invasion of March 2003.

With U.S. forces withdrawn from Iraq, government forces under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki have not been able to contain a wave of bombings and assassinations by Sunni groups, including al-Qaeda. 

Shiite vengeance on a significant scale may not be long in coming, and with it the risk of a sectarian civil war.

On top of this, several provinces, Shiite as well as Sunni, have in recent months declared they favored greater autonomy along the lines of the Kurds’ semi-autonomous enclave in northern Iraq. 

This could exacerbate ethnic and sectarian disputes over dwindling water resources. 

Authorities in the Kurdish enclave that spans three provinces in northeastern Iraq are building 11 dams, a move that is likely to inflame ethnic tensions over water. These have storage capacities that range from 990,000 to 9.1 million cubic meters. 

 “We have studies and designs to build 28 more,” the Kurdish Regional Government’s Agriculture Minister Jameel Suleiman announced in March 2011.

Water is a particularly virulent source of tension between Iraq’s Kurdish and Arab provinces. In multi-ethnic Kirkuk province, a flashpoint in territorial disputes between Arabs and Kurds, Arab farmers complain that Kurdistan shuts them off from the water held by its dams.

At the heart of that particular conflict is the Dukan Dam, built in 1955 in the Kurdish region 80 kilometers northeast of Kirkuk province.

 “They release too much water from June to September, while from October it’s the opposite: there’s not enough drinking water and even less to irrigate our lands,” complained Sheikh Khaled al-Mafraji, head of the Arab Political Council in Kirkuk that groups mainly Sunni tribal leaders.

The water issue is seen as a ticking time bomb in a province where ethnic loyalties are deep-rooted. “The water issue is critical,” said Sheikh Burhan Mezher, head of Kirkuk province’s agricultural department. “Thousands of people driven to unemployment blame their situation of Kurdistan.”    

Iraq’s water comes primarily from the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Both of these rise in Turkey, which has constructed a chain of dams over the last decade, with more to come. 

This has drastically reduced the flow of water into Iraq, where both rivers come together and flow into the northern Persian Gulf. 

Syria and Iran have been building dams too, further cutting the river flows from the north and the east.

Iraqi farmers recently blocked border crossings from Iran east of Baghdad to protest Tehran’s diversion of  the Al-Wind River that irrigates one of Iraq’s largest agricultural areas. The 50-kilometer-long river flows from Iran and joins the Diyala River, one of the five major tributaries of the Tigris.

“Cutting water is a crime against life,” declared the farmers’ leader, Mohammed Othman, mayor of the city of Khanaqin.

“Iran has diverted 15 tributaries to the Tigris since 2006 alone,” observed Casey Walther, an American who until January was the water projects coordinator in Iraq for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. 

Two new Iranian dams could potentially cut off water to two of Iraq’s main dams at Haditha in the northwest and Mosul in the north. “I visited them last summer and were already down to about 50 percent of capacity,” said Walther. 

Maliki’s government, and those under U.S. auspices that came before, have failed dismally in addressing the worsening problem, which has been exacerbated by climate change and poor control over resources.

Officials say accurate data on water are not available, making water security almost impossible to achieve. Walther says this is a critical failure by the government. 

“All the numbers you see are estimates and often outdated,” he said. “Iraqi officials cannot negotiate with neighboring Turkey or Syria, which control the flow of the Euphrates and Tigris.”

 “Water is not prioritized by the government,” says Mukdad Ali al-Jabbari, a professor of earth sciences at Baghdad University and an authority on the Euphrates and the Tigris. 

With tension over the dwindling water supply escalating, Walther fears the worst. “I’m concerned that when you look at the hydrological makeup of the country, the water comes from the northwest and travels down to the southeast, which is pretty much the country’s ethnic fault lines,” he observed.      

 “This is really an existential issue, people focus on the political strife now the United States has gone, but Iraq is one of the worst countries in the world, hydrologically speaking.”

 With the U.S. military withdrawal completed in December 2011, Walther fears the security situation, while not nearly as bad it was in 2005-2008, will steadily deteriorate because of the worsening water supply.

“There are more and more incidents of conflict and tension over the use, control and distribution of water resources,” he lamented.

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