Throughout the marshes, the reed gatherers, standing on land
they once floated over, cry out to visitors in a passing boat.
“Maaku mai!” they shout, holding up their rusty sickles. “There
is no water!”
The Euphrates is drying up. Strangled
by the water policies of Iraq’s neighbors, Turkey and Syria; a two-year
drought; and years of misuse by Iraq and its farmers, the river is
significantly smaller than it was just a few years ago. Some officials worry
that it could soon be half of what it is now.
The shrinking of the Euphrates, a
river so crucial to the birth of civilization that the Book of Revelation
prophesied its drying up as a sign of the end times, has decimated farms along
its banks, has left fishermen impoverished and has depleted riverside towns as
farmers flee to the cities looking for work.
The poor suffer more acutely, but all strata of society are
feeling the effects: sheiks, diplomats and even members of Parliament who retreat
to their farms after weeks in Baghdad.
Along the river, rice and wheat fields have turned to baked
dirt. Canals have dwindled to shallow streams, and fishing boats sit on dry
land. Pumps meant to feed water treatment plants dangle pointlessly over brown
puddles.
“The old men say it’s the worst they remember,” said Sayid
Diyia, 34, a fisherman in Hindiya, sitting in a riverside cafe full of his idle
colleagues. “I’m depending on God’s blessings.”
The drought is widespread in Iraq.
The area sown with wheat and barley in the rain-fed north is down roughly 95
percent from the usual, and the date palm and citrus orchards of the east are
parched. For two years rainfall has been far below normal, leaving the
reservoirs dry, and American officials predict that wheat and barley output
will be a little over half of what it was two years ago.
It is a crisis that threatens the roots of Iraq’s identity,
not only as the land between two rivers but as a nation that was once the
largest exporter of dates in the world, that once supplied German beer with
barley and that takes patriotic pride in its expensive Anbar rice.
Now Iraq
is importing more and more grain. Farmers along the Euphrates
say, with anger and despair, that they may have to abandon
Anbar rice for cheaper varieties.
Droughts are not rare in Iraq,
though officials say they have been more frequent in recent years. But drought
is only part of what is choking the Euphrates and its
larger, healthier twin, the Tigris.
The most frequently cited culprits are the Turkish and
Syrian governments. Iraq
has plenty of water, but it is a downstream country. There are at least seven
dams on the Euphrates in Turkey
and Syria,
according to Iraqi water officials, and with no treaties or agreements, the
Iraqi government is reduced to begging its neighbors for water.
At a conference in Baghdad
— where participants drank bottled water from Saudi
Arabia, a country with a fraction of Iraq’s
fresh water — officials spoke of disaster.
“We have a real thirst in Iraq,”
said Ali Baban, the minister of planning. “Our agriculture is going to die, our
cities are going to wilt, and no state can keep quiet in such a situation.”
Recently, the Water Ministry announced that Turkey
had doubled the water flow into the Euphrates, salvaging
the planting phase of the rice season in some areas.
That move increased water flow to about 60 percent of its
average, just enough to cover half of the irrigation requirements for the
summer rice season. Though Turkey
has agreed to keep this up and even increase it, there is no commitment binding
the country to do so.
With the Euphrates showing few signs
of increasing health, bitterness over Iraq’s
water threatens to be a source of tension for months or even years to come
between Iraq
and its neighbors. Many American, Turkish and even Iraqi officials,
disregarding the accusations as election-year posturing, say the real problem
lies in Iraq’s
own deplorable water management policies.
“There used to be water everywhere,” said Abduredha Joda, 40,
sitting in his reed hut on a dry, rocky plot of land outside Karbala.
Mr. Joda, who describes his dire circumstances with a tired smile, grew up near
Basra but fled to Baghdad
when Saddam Hussein drained the great marshes of southern Iraq
in retaliation for the 1991 Shiite uprising. He came to Karbala
in 2004 to fish and raise water buffaloes in the lush wetlands there that
remind him of his home.
“This year it’s just a desert,” he said.
Along the river, there is no shortage of resentment at the
Turks and Syrians. But there is also resentment at the Americans, Kurds,
Iranians and the Iraqi government, all of whom are blamed. Scarcity makes foes
of everyone.
The Sunni areas upriver seem to have enough water, Mr. Joda
observed, a comment heavy with implication.
Officials say nothing will improve if Iraq
does not seriously address its own water policies and its history of flawed
water management. Leaky canals and wasteful irrigation practices squander the
water, and poor drainage leaves fields so salty from evaporated water that
women and children dredge huge white mounds from sitting pools of runoff.
On a scorching morning in Diwaniya, Bashia Mohammed, 60, was
working in a drainage pool by the highway gathering salt, her family’s only
source of income now that its rice farm has dried up. But the dead farm was not
the real crisis.
“There’s no water in the river that we drink from,” she
said, referring to a channel that flows from the Euphrates.
“It’s now totally dry, and it contains sewage water. They dig wells but
sometimes the water just cuts out and we have to drink from the river. All my
kids are sick because of the water.”
In the southeast, where the Euphrates
nears the end of its 1,730-mile journey and mingles with the less salty waters
of the Tigris before emptying into the Persian
Gulf, the situation is grave. The marshes there that were
intentionally reflooded in 2003, rescuing the ancient culture of the marsh
Arabs, are drying up again. Sheep graze on land in the middle of the river.
The farmers, reed gatherers and buffalo herders keep
working, but they say they cannot continue if the water stays like this.
“Next winter will be the final chance,” said Hashem Hilead
Shehi, a 73-year-old farmer who lives in a bone-dry village west of the marshes.
“If we are not able to plant, then all of the families will leave.”
Amir A. al-Obeidi, Mohammed Hussein and Abeer Mohammed
contributed reporting.
