Turkey tells Iraq, Syria: No water

Turkey says it cannot give drought-stricken Iraq and Syria any more water from the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, claiming it’s short of water itself as it forges ahead with a mammoth dam-building program.

The thirsty downstream states, witnessing their farmland turning into dustbowls and their people migrating to overcrowded cities, say Turkey’s dams are the root of the problem. Both rivers rise in Turkish Anatolia.
“We’re aware of the need for water in our neighbors… but we do not have a lot of it in the reservoirs of our dams,” Turkey’s energy minister, Taner Yildiz, told his Iraqi and Syrian counterparts when they met in Ankara Friday.

The water issue has assumed strategic proportions for Iraq and Syria, which depend on the Euphrates and the Tigris for the bulk of their water.

Iraq is currently being ravaged by severe dust storms of a magnitude not seen for decades. Some officials are calling this an environmental catastrophe that is ruining what was once the region’s most fertile land, turning it into a desert. Drinking water is becoming scarce.

It’s the same across the entire Middle East. The region has been gripped by a worsening drought for four years and faces a deteriorating crisis over dwindling water resources.

The Middle East’s population is rising at an average rate of around 3.5 percent a year. It has more than quadrupled since 1950, to 364 million. It’s expected to hit 600 million by 2050.

Terra Daily