Drought Called a Factor in Syria’s Uprising

Two-and-a-half years ago, a group of children in the Syrian city of Dara’a triggered one of the bloodiest conflicts in the 21^st century when they painted some anti-government graffiti on a school wall in the ancient farming community.

The children were quickly detained and tortured, leading to widespread protests in the city that were met with harsh repression. The government’s brutal response led to a nationwide revolt that has now stagnated into a bloody stalemate with no end in sight. Dara’a is a mostly agricultural community in a region that has suffered an unrelenting drought since 2001.

Some experts say it’s no accident that Syria’s civil war began there. In 2009, the United Nations and other international agencies found that more than 800,000 Syrian farmers and herdsmen had been forced off their lands because of drought, with many crowding into cities like Dara’a. Additionally, thousands of illegal wells were drilled, drastically lowering the nation’s ground water supply.

The effects of drought and water-mismanagement in the region were highlighted recently by the publication of U.S. National Aeronautic and Space Administration satellite photographs of Syria, Turkey and Iraq. Faced with drought, Syrians crowding these farm towns started drilling deeper for fresh water in the aquifer beneath them. Experts estimated that 60 percent of the aquifer has been lost due to illegal drilling, and a total of 177 million-acre feet of water disappeared, the second-largest aquifer loss in the world.

Satellite images reveal depth of drought

“I actually don’t think the aquifer will recover,” said , a hydrologist and leader of a study of seven years of NASA satellite data that show the Tigris-Euphrates region second only to India in the speed of its groundwater loss. “The Middle East is the dry part of the world and now that climate change is expressing itself very clearly, one of the things that we will see is that the dry parts of the world will get drier,” Famiglietti said. “Think of it as a persistent prolonged drought.” Because of climate change, the Tigris-Euphrates basin and the underground reservoirs of fresh water that once nurtured this fragile desert climate may not be able to sustain future populations in Syria.

It all started in Dara’a

The Syrian uprising was unlike political uprisings in Egypt, Yemen and other Middle East states, all of which started in the major cities. Dara’a was a regional agricultural hub with a pre-war population of 90,000. “Dara’a is the capital of an agricultural province, one of the most significant agricultural areas,” said Syria scholar Ayel Zisser of the Tel Aviv University. Their protests spread from Dara’s at Syria’s southern border to communities north of Aleppo and across the vast al-Jazira plain that stretches from the banks of the Euphrates to the banks of the Tigris. The pattern of the protests followed the rural path of the drought. “Even until today it’s been a peasant revolt isolated to the rural areas,” Zisser said. Assad’s economic reforms focused on global trade that benefitted the urban middle classes, thereby worsening the plight of Syria’s farmers, according to Zisser. The reforms were implemented “at the expense of the population in the rural areas, where they abolished agricultural subsidies,” Zisser said. “The regime turned its back to the rural population and the result was the revolt.” Like other Middle Eastern countries, Syria’s population has increased dramatically in recent years. “This is the first time in history that in less than 30 years, the Middle East doubled its population. It was between 1950 and 1980,” said Arnon Soffer, a demographer and the head of research at the University of Haifa and Israel’s National Defense College. “If that’s not tragic enough, from 1980 to 2010 – another 30 years – this crazy area doubled itself again,” Soffer added. Even before climate change threatened less rainfall in the region, water was a hot-button issue. In 1973, Iraq rushed troops to Syria’s eastern border as upstream, Syria began filling its Tagba Dam with Euphrates water to create Lake Assad.

The real water power in basin is Turkey.

Syria and Iraq depend on the waters of the Euphrates and the Tigris, which flow from southern Turkey, for most of their agricultural irrigation. Farmers on both sides of the border also rely on traditional irrigation techniques that waste water resources. “Turks use most of the water of the Euphrates,” said Bogochan Benli, a water expert who worked in the Aleppo labs of the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas during the years of the drought. Aleppo and many northern Syrian communities traditionally also depended on the Euphrates for their drinking water, he said. In Turkey, Benli said since the 1970’s the Southeastern Anatolia project has created employment for a poor and arid region of Turkey. It’s the main income-generator for the region and their water policy “will never change.” The project is an ambitious development of 22 dams and 19 hydroelectric power plants to irrigate and provide electrical power in nine Turkish provinces. The centerpiece is the massive Ataturk Dam and hydroelectric power plant that opened in 1990. According Arnon Soffer of Haifa University a few months before the dam was completed, then-Turkish president Turgut Ozal told Syria’s president, Hafez al-Assad, “Now you can wash yourself for the next two months, but I will close the Ataturk Dam and I will dry the Euphrates River.” He said Ozal’s abrupt pronouncement to Hafez Assad was devastating to Syria. “The Euphrates became a wadi, a dry valley,” said Soffer. Assad Dam closed for a month. “The dam was empty and there was no electricity. Even up to today, I could not imagine how they could recover.” Though Turkey and its downstream neighbors have discussed sharing their waters, Turkey has not signed away any rights. With little or no regional cooperation on water issues, experts fear that the turmoil now wrecking Syria could be a prelude to other conflicts in the region. More

While there is still no regional conflict in the region there is a compelling need for an international organization to start a regional conversation on trans-boundary rivers. Rivers, although they may, as in this case originate in Turkey, are a critical element of the global commons, and must be fairly shared by all riverine states. We are no longer in colonial times where for instance Egypt got the lions share of the Nile, leaving very little for Ethiopia. Syria is already in turmoil, Turkey is simmering with protests, Jordan is being blown to and froe and Israel may go off on a tangent at any time. Let us therefore address this issue immediately.

 

Ancient aqueducts [karez] give Iraq a trickle of hope

A millennia-old labyrinth of underground canals may help solve the Middle East's water crisis, say experts.

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

 

Freshwater Stores Shrink in Tigris-Euphrates Basin

Scientists using the twin gravity-measuring satellites of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) have found that a large portion of the Middle East lost freshwater reserves rapidly during the past decade. The research team observed the Tigris and Euphrates river basins—including parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran—and found that 117 million acre feet (144 cubic kilometers) of fresh water was lost from 2003 to 2009. That amount is roughly equivalent to the volume of the Dead Sea. About 60 percent of the loss was attributed to the pumping of groundwater from underground reservoirs.

The two natural-color images above were acquired by the Landsat 5 satellite and show the shrinking of the Qadisiyah Reservoir in Iraq between September 7, 2006 and September 15, 2009. The first graph shows the elevation of the water in that reservoir between January 2003 and December 2009. The elevation is a proxy measurement for the total volume of water stored there; labels show the water elevation at the time of the satellite images.

The second graph shows the water storage for the entire study area as measured by GRACE from January 2003 to December 2009. The gray line depicts total water storage in the region—groundwater, surface water bodies, and soil moisture—while the green line depicts changes in surface water. The difference between those two lines reflects the change in water stored in underground aquifers (ground water). The total water storage shows a seasonal fluctuation, but also an overall downward trend, suggesting that groundwater is being pumped and used faster than natural processes can replenish it.

“GRACE data show an alarming rate of decrease in total water storage in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins, which currently have the second fastest rate of groundwater storage loss on Earth, after India,” said Jay Famiglietti, principal investigator of the study. “The rate was especially striking after the 2007 drought. Meanwhile, demand for freshwater continues to rise, and the region does not coordinate its water management because of different interpretations of international laws.”

Obtaining ground-based data in Middle East can be difficult, so data from satellites such as GRACE are essential to providing a global picture of water storage trends. Within any given region on Earth, rising or falling water reserves alter the planet’s mass, influencing the gravity field of the area. By periodically measuring gravity in each region, the GRACE satellites tells us how water storage changes over time. (To learn more about GRACE’s ability to study fresh water on Earth, read The Gravity of Water.)

The researchers calculated that about one-fifth of the water losses in their Tigris-Euphrates study region came from snowpack shrinking and soil drying up, partly in response to a 2007 drought. Loss of surface water from lakes and reservoirs accounted for another fifth of the losses. The majority of the loss—approximately 73 million acre feet (90 cubic kilometers)—was due to reductions in groundwater. “That's enough water to meet the needs of tens of millions to more than a hundred million people in the region each year, depending on regional water-use standards and availability,” Famiglietti said. More

 

 

Karez in Iraqi Kurdistan Parts 1 & 2

 

Ancient water tunnels called karez in Iraqi Kurdistan are rapidly drying up, a clear sign that the recent regional droughts are hitting the villages hard. Climate change seems to be unfolding at a wider scale and the future for groundwater supply seems bleak. Dale Lightfoot, an american geographer, travels the northern provinces of Kurdistan to document the situation. It urges UNESCO to set up a major initiative to safe the karez tunnels of Kurdistan.