What caused the water crisis in the Middle East?

Drought and poor management of resources have led to financial hardship, protests and strained relationships across the region. Governments were warned but did not act, writes Richard Spencer

In Baghdad you can wade across the River Tigris for the first time in recorded history.

In northwest Iran, pleasure boats lie idle and rusting in a bed of salt that was once the magnificent and huge Lake Urmia, the waters they used to ply having receded so far into the distance that they are out of sight.

In Syria, water shortages have come full circle. A decade ago a drought, exacerbated by poor water management, in the Euphrates valley forced hundreds of thousands of people off the land, into the poorer quarters of its ancient cities.

At Lake Urmia in Iran, the water has receded so far into the distance that it is out of sightALAMY

Now satellite analysis reveals that some of Syria’s reservoirs are dangerously depleted: one obvious explanation is that among the country’s millions of refugees are many of its best water engineers and pipe-layers.

“The drought in 1999-2000 caused severe losses for farmers and forced them to flee to big cities like Damascus and Aleppo,” said Nishan Kurdi, whose family were forced to give up their 60-acre wheat farm in the northeast province of Hasakeh. “The drought came back in 2006.”

It has returned again this year in Hasakeh, he said. The area is now under the control of Kurdish forces backed by the West, after a four-way war between them, Islamic State, other rebels and the regime. But its economy and agriculture have yet to return to anything like normal.

The Tigris and Euphrates river basins, and the countries like Iraq, Iran and Syria that share them, were once Mesopotamia, the fertile crescent, the cradle of civilisation. However, where once there was abundance, there now seems to be nothing but conflict.

Iraq is threatening Turkey over its giant Ilisu dam, on the Tigris 30 miles north of the border with Iraq, which began to fill last month — and which Baghdad says is responsible for the sudden drop in water levels in the Iraqi capital. Iraq also accuses Iran of damming Tigris tributaries in its territory.

The Tigris river flows through the ancient town of Hasankeyf, which will be submerged by Turkey’s new damUMIT BEKTAS/REUTERS

Meanwhile in Iran last weekend there was another round of urban protests as residents of two cities near its coastline on the Gulf set cars and government buildings on fire. Shots were fired as security forces brought them under control, and several people were injured. Water shortages and pollution, as in a number of recent other cases of unrest, were to blame.

In Khorramshah, the residents posted videos of brown water running from the taps. In the streets, they shouted: “They have plundered us in the name of religion.” The next day in Abadan, the capital of Iran’s oil industry, protesters held up banners saying “Drinking water is our right” — a play on a regime slogan “Nuclear energy is our right”.

Aware that many of the problems centre on areas that are poor, conservative bedrocks of the Islamic Revolution, the authorities have been keen to assuage rather than confront the protesters, promising to improve both supply and quality.

They can hardly not do so, as their own experts have been warning of what was happening for years. One paper on the implications of a population that has quadrupled in size in six decades was written back in 2005 by Reza Ardakanian, a Canadian-trained professor of water resource management.

Reza Ardakanian, a professor of water resource management, is now the Iranian energy ministerSERHAT CAGDAS/ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY

“Per capita water resources have steadily decreased and will continue to decrease in the future,” he noted starkly. Groundwater extraction, particularly for farming, had nearly tripled and appeared to be double safe levels, from his figures.

Mr Ardakanian is now minister for energy, one of several experts to have been brought into government. His new role suggests something that international experts have also been saying: while drought appears to a direct cause of conflicts across the Middle East, the real issue is political.

Climate change may be making matters worse from the point of view of current inhabitants — Iranian cities now regularly see temperatures above 55C, or 130F — but Mesopotamia has flourished in its heat for thousands of years.

Lake Urmia in northern Iran for example, where ferry boats lie disused in the salt flats left behind as the waters shrink to a quarter of their previous size, is a victim of the excessive dam-building which has blocked the rivers that feed it. It is also a victim of the government’s refusal to heed warnings about it.

Tehran has announced a huge multibillion dollar project to restore Lake Urmia to its original sizeFATEMEH BAHRAMI/ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY

In 2000 a geologist-turned-journalist called Nikahang Kowsar wrote so many pieces about the folly of the government’s mania for building dams — the republic has constructed more than 600 — that he was called in to see then-President Khatami. The authorities formed a committee to investigate his claims, composed of men from the ministry he was criticising.

Now he is in exile in the United States but still writing about the crisis. Dams, he points out, are immediately popular, and provide juicy contracts for construction companies and photo-opportunities for politicians, often linked in Iran’s case via the Islamic Republic’s Revolutionary Guard, which controls several big businesses.

However, the reservoirs they create lead to huge water loss through evaporation and deplete supplies downstream. Most water for farming, a pillar industry in a country that sets a premium on self-sufficiency in food supplies, still has to be drilled from the ground.

In Khorramshahr and Abadan, on the Shatt-al-Arab waterway where the Tigris and the Euphrates meet the sea, supplies are contaminated by the salt-water being sucked backed upstream as the river levels fall and the marshes of southern Iraq dry out. “I warned President Khatami about this situation,” Mr Kowsar said. “We are now at the start of that crisis.”

Three years ago, the view that climate change caused the Syrian civil war became a brief vogue, espoused by figures ranging from the Prince of Wales to the singer Charlotte Church. They linked rising temperatures and the Middle East’s drought problems to Syria’s unrest, mediated by families like Nishan Kurdi’s that were forced off their land into urban shanty towns.

Subsequent studies have shown however that Syria’s drought in the 2000s was no worse than previous ones. The underlying problem was more complex, though not much more so.

Thousands of Syrians crowd into Damascus' main Omayyad Mosque to pray for rainREUTERS

Under the former President Hafez al-Assad, eastern Syria’s oil supplies enabled the regime to subsidise cheap fuel for farmers, who used it to drill wells and pump water and hugely expand agricultural production.

Just as those groundwater supplies were, as a result, disappearing, his son, Bashar al-Assad, reversed economic course, enacting the newly fashionable economic policies of cutting subsidies. Fuel prices leapt.

“Ground-water resources in Hasakeh were actually being exploited by 300 per cent over safe yields,” said Jan Selby, a professor of international relations at Sussex University who has studied the area and specifically took on the prince’s views in a paper last year. “There was the same extreme level of water extraction elsewhere in Syria.”

Visitors to places once obscure in the West but now made famous by war, like Hasakeh or Raqqa and Deir Ezzor to the south, are often puzzled to be told they are the bread basket of Syria. The parched semi-desert stretches out into the distance, dust swirling.

The lesson is obvious: just as with oil, abundance can be a curse as well as a blessing. For millennia, Mesopotamia built extensive underground irrigation channels known as “qanats”, allowing for such abundance that the post-war dictatorships thought the water would never run out.

In 2005, Professor Ardakanian wrote that usage was beyond a level regarded by experts as sustainable. New government figures suggest the situation is now worse.

A displaced Iraqi boy receives a drink of water after his family were forced to flee MosulDANISH SIDDIQUI REUTERS

With so much supply coming from groundwater, Iran is literally sinking: parts of Tehran, the capital, are collapsing by a foot a year.

Nasa satellites in 2013 found that the weight of water in the Middle East’s reserves was shrinking so fast, it could be measured through the region’s gravitational pull.

As Professor Selby says, this is not climate change causing a political crisis. This is a man-made crisis all of its own.