Drought devastated rural communities and exacerbated the "disaster"
The Fertile Crescent is fading in the Middle East with the scarcity of rain
Sheep grazing in the arid desert.
Reuters
Abu Hamza holds some squash in an area near Idlib.
Reuters
A child fills barrels of drinking water that are transported by vehicles, especially after the rain water has been cut off and the rivers have dried up.
Reuters
A woman grazes herd near the village of Al-Bu Hussain in Diwaniyah, Iraq, where there is neither water nor grass.
Reuters
Ali Alwan.
Reuters
A child in Diwaniyah, Iraq, receives treatment on her foot after sustaining injuries caused by polluted water.
Reuters
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Abbas Alwan checked well after well in a desperate attempt to find water for his family's farms in southern Iraq. After another attempt failed last August, he grabbed a gun one night and slipped into the dark.
Hikma Meteb found her husband's body the next day, shot in the head, in a dry irrigation canal near the barren land that produced enough wheat and barley for the large Alwan family.
"This was his last hope," Abbas's brother, Ali, 56, told Reuters.
As world leaders gather in Egypt for a climate summit to discuss issues including water and food security, Alwan's plight highlights the crisis facing Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries, which could fuel further unrest in the region as societies grapple over dwindling water resources.
Reuters spoke to more than 20 people in five governorates across Iraq, all of whom said a prolonged drought, which has only worsened in recent years, is hampering livelihoods.
Farmers in neighboring Syria and Turkey suffer from reduced rains.
The United Nations Mission in Iraq said that "climate change is a reality in Iraq," adding that Iraq ranks fifth in the world among the countries most vulnerable to the repercussions of global warming, due to high temperatures, decreased precipitation, salinity and dust storms.
In Iraq, water officials and experts said, the rains came later and stopped earlier in each of the past three years.
Iraq, which is part of the Fertile Crescent, an arc stretching from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, where agriculture developed more than 10,000 years ago, has been devastated by three factors: low rainfall, decades of conflict, and reduced water flow. The two main rivers, Tigris and Euphrates.
Iraq's president, Abdul Latif Rashid, said at a climate summit in Egypt last week that desertification now threatens nearly 40 percent of our country, which was once one of the most fertile and productive in the region.
Crop damage
Nazir al-Ansari, a professor at Sweden's Luleå University of Technology, said the average rainfall in Iraq has decreased by 30 percent over the past three decades, with the lowest level in the past two years.
He added that what was previously known as the Fertile Crescent began to fade about 35 years ago.
"The decrease in the amount of water flowing from Turkey through the Tigris and Euphrates rivers made Iraq in a more difficult situation when the rains dried up," said Harry Estepanian, an independent energy and water expert in Washington and senior fellow at the Iraqi Energy Institute.
The country depends on the two rivers more than any other source of irrigation.
"Rain and groundwater have become very important (sources)," he added.
Baghdad says that dams upstream, especially in Turkey, empty its rivers.
Turkey says it has not changed rivers or cut off any water.
Ankara's ambassador to Iraq said last July that drought had also hit Turkey, and that Iraq should manage its supplies more carefully rather than requesting more water.
Data from the Turkish Meteorological Agency showed that rainfall this year through September was 29% lower than the average for the previous three decades, and that the situation was worse in 2021 in southeastern Turkey, from which the Tigris and Euphrates rivers originate.
Water expert Estepanian said the combination of dams and drought has reduced the waters of the two rivers flowing into Iraq this year to only one-fifth of the previous levels.
He added that the inefficient use of the water that Iraq gets, due to mismanagement and illegal seizure of supplies, and the old infrastructure, which allows water to leak after decades of war, combined with the rapid population growth to exacerbate the crisis.
Nearly 90 percent of rain-fed crops, mostly wheat and barley, have failed this season, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Iraq.
Before 2020, Iraq could produce approximately 5.5 million tons of wheat.
Salah al-Hajj Hassan, the FAO representative in Iraq, told Reuters that last year the government received only 2.1 million.
The lockers are out of order
On his farm in Diwaniya, Abbas Alwan received unemployment benefits of $200 a month, but fell into debt as the harvest dwindled and food prices soared.
Desperately, Abbas, who was 62 when he committed suicide, dug wells so he could grow vegetables.
The cost of digging each well was equivalent to the monthly subsidy he received, and each time the well was filled with water for a few days and then soon dried up.
Ali Alwan said his family is now struggling even to get drinking water.
The village of Al-Buhassin, in which they live, is one of many villages on the banks of the former canal, whose course has now completely dried up, and which formed part of a network of water branches east of the Euphrates River.
In the nearby village of Al Buzayat, many have left for cities or other governorates in search of work.
"The village is empty," said Hadia Odeh, one of the few residents who were in the village when Reuters visited her last October.
Hadiya and her husband stopped growing wheat and barley three years ago due to lack of water, and sold what they had of livestock, and they had to travel about 60 kilometers twice a month to buy drinking water.
When Reuters returned to their village in November, they had abandoned it to the city.
"About 800 families have left the villages," said the mayor of the Al Budayr area, in which the Alwan farm is located.
"I don't even think about providing water for agriculture. I have two months now and I'm thinking about how to provide drinking water," he added.
Estepanian, an independent energy and water expert, said Iraq's water consumption should be near 70 billion cubic meters annually, but now it has fallen by about half to about 40 billion.
"This will be the fourth consecutive dry season," said Ahmed Kadhem Al-Khuzaie, an official at the Iraqi Ministry of Water Resources.
Weather forecasts do not look optimistic and the tanks are completely out of service.
While southern Iraq suffers some of the most severe water shortages, few areas are not affected.
In northern Iraq and Syria, the same factors of poor rain and lack of river water combined with conflict and marginalization have devastated rural communities.
A struggle for water
The Director General of Water Resources at the Ministry of Agriculture in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, Karawan Sabah Hama Salih, said that wheat production in the region has fallen by about 70% this year to 300,000 tons, forcing many to dig wells.
"Drilling wells is not a strategic solution, but we do not have a quick alternative," he added.
And across the border in Syria, the levels of the dams built on the Euphrates River decreased by about five meters, which led to a decrease in the levels of reservoirs and the suffering of farmers in accessing the remaining reserves of water.
Officials accuse Turkey of reducing the river's flow over the past two years to half the levels it pledged in a 1987 agreement, which Ankara denies.
"I stopped farming because it was impossible to irrigate farmland," said Ahmed Hammoud, standing by the freshly dried up banks of the Euphrates River in northern Syria.
Syria's long-running civil war broke out in the wake of anti-government protests in 2011, after a prolonged drought hit crop and livestock revenues and drove people to cities.
A United Nations climate science panel said in April that popular unrest was a direct result of the drought, but predicted that an uprising would have broken out anyway.
Seven Iraqi tribal leaders and officials said that competition over water in southern Iraq fuels disputes and conflicts between farming communities.
Mustafa Quzmouz, a 23-year-old farmer in Diwaniyah, was killed in a dispute three years ago after his neighbor laid a pipeline from a canal to divert more water, according to Quzmouz's brother Haider.
"If there was water, such problems would not have started," he added.
In October, a video clip posted on social media showed security forces clashing with farmers at a canal in Muthanna.
Abd al-Wahhab al-Yasiri, deputy governor for agricultural and water affairs in the southern governorate, said that 30 people were injured and 11 were arrested. He pointed out that the quarrel broke out when the Ministry of Water employees began to replace a distribution pipe in the canal because water levels had fallen below its level.
Downstream residents feared that the measure was intended to divert more water away from them.
Standing next to a drying branch of that canal, the tribal leader, Maqsad Rahim, said he remembered when that branch was full of clear water and green trees around it.
"Now there are a lot of sandstorms because there are no plants or trees to protect us," he added.
• Wheat production in the Kurdistan region fell by about 70% this year to 300 thousand tons, forcing many to dig wells.
• Desertification now threatens nearly 40% of the area of Iraq, a country that was one of the most fertile and productive countries in the region.
• Iraq ranks fifth in the world among the countries most vulnerable to the repercussions of global warming, due to high temperatures, decreased precipitation, salinity and dust storms.
• Across the border in Syria, the levels of the dams built on the Euphrates River decreased by about five meters, which led to a shortage of reservoir levels and farmers' suffering in accessing the remaining reserves of water.
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