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Gallery|In Pictures

Disaster looms in Syria as Euphrates dwindles

Experts warn of an impending humanitarian catastrophe in northeast Syria, where waning river flow is rapidly waning.

Aid groups and engineers are warning of a looming humanitarian disaster in northeast Syria, where plummeting water levels at hydroelectric dams since January are threatening water and power supply for millions amid the coronavirus pandemic and economic crisis. [Delil Souleiman/AFP]
Published On 30 Aug 202130 Aug 2021
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Syria’s longest river used to flow by his olive grove, but Khaled al-Khamees says it has now receded into the distance, parching his trees and leaving his family with hardly a drop to drink.

“It’s as if we were in the desert,” said the 50-year-old farmer, standing on what last year was the Euphrates riverbed.

“We’re thinking of leaving because there’s no water left to drink or irrigate the trees.”

Aid groups and engineers are warning of a looming humanitarian disaster in northeast Syria, where waning river flow is compounding woes after a decade of war.

They say plummeting water levels at hydroelectric dams since January are threatening water and power cutoffs for up to five million Syrians, in the middle of a coronavirus pandemic and economic crisis.

As drought grips the Mediterranean region, many in the Kurdish-held area are accusing neighbour and arch foe Turkey of weaponising water by tightening the tap upstream, though a Turkish source denied this.

Outside the village of Rumayleh where al-Khamees lives, black irrigation hoses lay in dusty coils after the river receded so far it became too expensive to operate the water pumps.

Instead, much closer to the water’s edge, al-Khamees and neighbours were busy planting corn and beans in the soil just last year submerged under the current.

The father of 12 said he had not seen the river so far away from the village in decades.

“The women have to walk 7km [4 miles] just to get a bucket of water for their children to drink,” he said.

Reputed to have once flown through the biblical Garden of Eden, the Euphrates runs for almost 2,800km (1,700 miles) across Turkey, Syria and Iraq.

In times of rain, it gushes into northern Syria through the Turkish border and flows diagonally across the war-torn country towards Iraq.

Along its way, it irrigates swaths of land in Syria’s breadbasket and runs through three hydroelectric dams that provide power and drinking water to millions.

But over the past eight months, the river has contracted to a sliver, sucking precious water out of reservoirs and increasing the risk of dam turbines grinding to a halt.

At the Tishrin Dam, the first into which the river falls in Syria, director Hammoud al-Hadiyyeen described an “alarming” drop in water levels not seen since the dam’s completion in 1999.

“It’s a humanitarian catastrophe,” he said.

Almost 90 percent of the Euphrates flow comes from Turkey, the United Nations says. To ensure Syria's fair share, Turkey in 1987 agreed to allow an annual average of 500 cubic metres per second of water across its border. But that has dropped to as low as 200 in recent months, engineers claim. [Delil Souleiman/AFP]
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A youth walks with a shovel near water pumps drawing water from Lake Assad in the village of Al-Tuwayhinah near the Tabqa Dam along the Euphrates River in Raqqa province, eastern Syria. [Delil Souleiman/AFP]
A UN climate change report this month found human influence had almost certainly increased the frequency of simultaneous heatwaves and droughts worldwide. [Delil Souleiman/AFP]
A technician marks a water level figure in chalk along the wall of the 1999 Tishrin (October) Dam along the Euphrates River near Manbij in east Syria. [Delil Souleiman/AFP]
Five million people depend on the Euphrates for drinking water, but people are increasingly consuming unsafe water. [Delil Souleiman/AFP]
An interior view of the generators at the Tishrin (October) Dam on the Euphrates River. [Delil Souleiman/AFP]
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Marwa Daoudy, a Syrian scholar of environmental security, said the decreasing flow of the Euphrates was 'very alarming'. 'These levels threaten whole rural communities in the Euphrates Basin whose livelihood depends on agriculture and irrigation.' [Delil Souleiman/AFP]
Waterborne disease outbreaks are on the rise, and contaminated ice has caused diarrhoea in displacement camps, according to the NES Forum, an NGO coordination body for the region. [Delil Souleiman/AFP]


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