Page 1 of 3 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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