somebody bring me some water...
The dust bowl of Babylon
By Martin Chulov
BAGHDAD - From his mud brick home on the edge of the Garden of Eden, Awda Khasaf has twice seen his country's lifeblood seep away. The waters that once spread from his doorstep across a 20% slab of Iraq known as the Marshlands first disappeared in 1991, when Saddam Hussein diverted them east to punish the rebellious Marsh Arabs. The wetlands have been crucial to Iraq since the earliest days of civilization - sustaining the lives of up to half a million people who live in and around the area, while providing water for almost two million more.
The waters vanished after the first Gulf War due to a dictator's wrath; over the next 16 years, they ebbed and flowed, but slowly started to return to their pre-Saddam levels. By 2007, with no more sabotage and average rains, almost 70% of the lost water had been recovered. Now it's gone again, this time because of a crisis far more endemic: a devastating drought and the water policies of neighboring Turkey, Iran, and Syria. These three nations have effectively stopped most of the headwaters of the three rivers - the Tigris, Euphrates, and Karoon - that feed these marshes.
"Once in a generation was bad enough," says Awda, a tribal head and local sheikh in the al-Akeryah Marshlands, who also advises the Nasiriyah governorate on water issues. "Twice could well be God's vengeance."
In a land where fundamental interpretations of monotheistic scripts often determine the tone of public discourse, particular attention is now being paid to the biblical Book of Revelation, in which drying up of the Euphrates river was prophesized as a harbinger for the end of the world. It is not doomsday yet in Iraq, but the water shortage here has not been worse for at least two centuries - and possibly for several millennia more. Government estimates suggest close to two million Iraqis face severe drinking-water shortages and extremely limited hydropower-generated electricity in a part of the country where most households , in the best of times get by on no more than eight hours of supplied power per day.
The flow of the Euphrates that reaches Iraq is down, according to scientific estimates, by 50% to 70% and falling further by the week. From his frugal office in Baghdad's National Center for Water Management, engineer Zuhair Hassan Ahmed has for the past decade plotted the water levels of the Euphrates and of the Tigris, which bisects the Iraqi capital. The hand-etched ink graphs show a black line that marks an average "water year" from October to May, superimposed over a green line, which shows the actual flow through the two rivers over the same time. The green line had been markedly lower than the benchmark for much of the past decade. But in 2007, the start of a serious drought, it dipped sharply and has continued to fall.
In Baghdad, the lack of water has been an inconvenience, an eyesore, and a health hazard. Raw sewage and refuse pumped into the Tigris is not flushed downstream as rapidly as it once was. The Tigris is Baghdad's main artery, and is still a working river, long traversed by small commuter ferries, industrial barges, and, in the city's halcyon days, even pleasure boats. Giant mud islands now protrude from the once wide, blue expanse of the river, making it unnavigable for larger vessels. Further downstream, and especially along the Euphrates - which runs roughly on a parallel track west though Iraq's bread basket - the effects of the shortage are far worse.
Between two rivers
Here, in the land between the two rivers that was once the heartland of ancient Mesopotamia, the water crisis has ravaged agriculture, an industry still struggling to regain its footing after three decades of deprivation and war. This was the second mooted site (the other was the Marshlands themselves) of the fabled Garden of Eden - a land so rich in soil and water that it would quench the needs of its dwellers throughout eternity.
It doesn't look quite like that now. Crops of grain, barley, mint, and dates have failed almost en masse. Further west, in Anbar province, a prized rice variety that was once sold at a premium throughout Iraq and in the markets of neighboring countries has just been harvested. Like almost all other crops, this year's yield is a disaster.
"We blame the Turks for this," says Hatem al-Ansari, a local Anbar rice grower who claims to have lost half his family's life savings this year due to a lack of water to irrigate his rice. "We have been digging wells nearby, and so has the government, but it is not enough. Not even close."
Shielding his face with a black scarf from a sandstorm blowing in on an acetylene desert wind, Hatem points in the direction of the Euphrates' upper reaches. "If you go down to the bank, you will see where the water was last year and last week," he says. "Our water pumps can no longer reach it. It's true it hasn't been raining, but it's just as true that even 30% of normal rainfall does not cripple a mighty river like this."
He had to be taken on his word. The swirling sand and dust were starting to turn the sky an ochre-orange haze and were steadily closing like a shroud on us all, making an inspection of the river bank impossible.
Sandstorms have long been a fixture of Iraqi summers - on average, there are about eight to 10 each hot season. This year they became a pandemic. Close to 40 sandstorms blew in during the five months from May to early October. Some lasted three days at a time, sheeting farms with suffocating silt, closing airports, and adding another layer of misery to a society that has been through hell.
Lack of water for irrigation, especially in Anbar, is a key problem. Iraq's water minister, Dr Abdul Rashid Latif, says the government dug an extra 1,000 wells over the past two years, taking advantage of a relatively high groundwater table. But drawing on a diminishing resource during a time of drought has proved costly. "We now have only around 20% of our original reserves left," he says. "And the thing about this water is that not much of it is being replenished."
Scent of a dying ecosystem
Iraq's water numbers make for disturbing reading across the board. Government estimates put total reservoir storage at around 9% of nationwide capacity on the leading edge of a wet season that is not forecast to bring much relief. For the past two years, rainfall was some 70% lower than usual in most of Iraq's 18 provinces.
The snow melt that usually feeds the Tigris system from the Zagros Mountains in the Kurdish north was equally deficient. There are now seven dams on the adjoining Euphrates system, most in Turkey and Syria, with plans for at least one more. Then there are the rampant inefficiencies built into Iraq's antiquated 12,500 kilometers of canals and drains, which send countless millions of gallons gushing into parts of the country that have little use for the water and no means to harness it even if they did.
Some have looked to the heavens to explain the lack of rain. Society here is deeply superstitious. Many Iraqis, from the Sunni Arabs of Anbar to the tribes of the Marshlands, believe the natural deficiencies are God-ordained - and possibly a punishment for the sectarian ravages that have torn the country apart over the last three years.
"Droughts have happened before and will plague us again," says Awda as he surveys the vast expanse of hard-baked and cracked brown mud in front of him that used to be the Marshlands. "But not even in '91 was the water like this. Now there is nothing."
The only water left in the maze of feeder streams that empty into this giant basin are pools of lime-colored stagnant ooze. Nothing flows. Ducks and geese sit listlessly on creek banks that have not been exposed in decades - if ever - to direct sunlight. Infestations of flies circle like Saturn's rings around giant, steel barrels of drinking water, imported from the nearby city of Nasiriyah, that line village roads. Reeds that were once the staple of the agrarian peoples who worked this waterway through the ages jut starkly from the banks, nearly all of them yellow and hardened, looking more like medieval weapons of war than crops.
Earlier this fall, the major tributaries of the Euphrates were flowing at around 30% of their normal levels. "Look at that mark on the bank," says Awda, pointing to a stain on a corrugated iron beam at the base of the bridge. Not long ago, he notes, this had been a high-water mark. The waterline is now nearly three meters lower. The pungent murk of the riverbed lingers in the air. "Take a deep breath," says Awda. "That smell is the scent of a dying ecosystem."
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