Iraq urges Turkey to release more water into Tigris, Euphrates

Iraq’s Water Resources Minister Mehdi al-Hamdani called on Turkish president’s special representative for Iraq, Veysel Eroglu, to increase “quantities of water arriving in Iraq through the Tigris and Euphrates” from Turkey, an Iraqi statement said.

Hamdani told Eroglu via videoconference to ask Turkish officials “to re-examine the amounts of water released, in order to allow Iraq to overcome the current water shortage,” it added.

Eroglu said he would pass on the request to water authorities in Ankara to “increase the amounts of water released in the coming days, according to (Turkey’s) available reserves”, the statement said.

The two officials also agreed that an Iraqi “technical delegation” would visit Turkish dams to evaluate the water reserves of the country.

In the past, Iraqi delegations visited Turkey to discuss the country’s water share amid environmental concerns caused by Turkey’s construction of dams.

Turkey’s controversial Ilisu Dam has reportedly reduced water flow into Iraqi rivers’ basin by 34 percent and caused 94 percent of the Mesopotamia to dry up, kicking up dust storms in Syria and Iraq which head to Iran and cripple life in the southwestern and western provinces.

In early 2018, an Iranian Energy Ministry official complained that Turkey was exacerbating the situation by continuing to build more dams, leaving more parched river basins which become new breeding grounds for dust storms.

The UN classifies the Arab nation “as the fifth most vulnerable country in the world” to climate change, having already witnessed record low rainfall and high temperatures in recent years.

On Tuesday, Turkey’s ambassador to Iraq, Ali Riza Guney, accused the Iraqis of “squandering” water resources, calling on Twitter for “immediate measures to reduce the waste” including “the modernization of irrigation systems”.

Hamdani replied, saying Ankara was assuming “the right to reduce Iraq’s water quota”.

The Iraqi nation has witnessed three years of successive droughts and has halved cultivated agricultural areas for its 42 million inhabitants.

“Water reserves have dropped 60 percent compared to last year,” a government official said this Wednesday, Iraq’s INA news agency reported. Water levels arriving from the Tigris and the Euphrates were around a third of the average over the past century, according to the figures.