A millennia-old labyrinth of underground canals may help solve the Middle East's water crisis, say experts.
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| The ancient karez in Kunaflusa |
In the windswept plateaus of northern Iraq, unseen aqueducts which have channelled water to arid settlements for centuries are running dry. Experts say the wide-scale demise of these ancient water systems is an ominous sign of how scarce water in the region will soon become, and the humanitarian disasters that could follow.
For villagers here, tragic consequences have already arrived.
Farez Abdulrahman Ali strides across a muddy field and sweeps a burly arm towards the mountains that loom over Shekh Mamudian village in the wilds of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan region. This is the rugged terrain of the peshmerga, the Kurdish military whose name means "those who face death".
Ali explains that a subterranean canal - known in Iraq as a karez - once brought water to the village, where it gushed from a rock-lined tunnel into a pool just below the entrance to the local mosque. From there, it was channelled to nearby fields of okra, eggplant, onion and tobacco.
"Farmers would use the water," said Ali. "On hot days, children would play in the water. In the evenings, people would gather at the karez to talk about village things."
"The karez dates back to the time when karez were dug," he added, matter-of-factly. "Nobody in the village knows when it was dug. Even my grandfather doesn't know. It is probably 800 or 900 or 1,000 years old."
"There is now not enough water for farming. If the karez runs dry,
we will be forced to leave the village." - Fadel Salah, Kunaflusa villager
Dry county
In autumn 2011, for the first time in the village's collective memory, the karez in Shekh Mamudian went dry. As the village chief, or mukhtar, Ali sees the loss of the karez as catastrophic for the livestock and crops the village depends on for its hard won self-sufficiency. Unless it is restored, he fears for the end of a community that withstood assaults by Saddam Hussein’s army in the 1980s, and survived as a bloody no-man's land in the Kurdish civil war of the mid-1990s.
"The karez was the source of life," Ali said. "The village now feels like a family that has lost its father."
Echoes of Ali’s lament are being heard throughout the arid mountains and plains of Kurdistan, where the widespread demise of karez is becoming a humanitarian nightmare.
Last year, an inventory of karez systems in Kurdistan - believed to be the first such compiled in modern times - found that decades of war and years of grinding drought, combined with neglect and over-pumping from nearby mechanised wells, had brought these vital water lifelines to the edge of extinction.
According to a UNESCO report, just 116 of the 683 karez networks located in northern Iraq were still supplying water as of August 2009. As many as 40 per cent of the region's karez have dried up in the past four years alone.
Since 2005, more than 100,000 people have been forced to abandon their homes because their karez stopped flowing, and a further 36,000 are at immediate risk of evacuating their villages, according to the UN agency.
Parched land
In Kunaflusa, a rocky 90-minute drive north of Erbil, the village karez was last year producing only a trickle. Village mukhtar Fadel Abdullah Salah said families were allotted one-hour time slots to fill up enough water jugs to last a week.
"There is not enough water now for farming," said Salah. "If the karez runs dry, we will be forced to leave the village."
Water brought in tanker trucks by the Kurdistan Regional Government has helped the people of Kunaflusa. But experts say quick fixes such as hauling in water or drilling new, gas-fuelled wells are expensive band-aids that will ultimately prove unsustainable.
Salah said the village had some 200 houses in 1984, but today only 13 remain occupied. The UN report found that, on average, 70 per cent of residents moved away from their villages after the local karez went dry. More
