Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2004, pages 32-33

Special Report

	(CIA World Factbook).

JUST AFTER DAWN in areas south of Baghdad the land glistens with color, as if millions of diamonds refracted the morning sun. But this polychrome display does not imply wealth—it signals, quite to the contrary, that those areas are agriculturally dead or dying. The crystals are salt, driven to the surface in the final stage of salinization of those irrigated areas.

Iraq, the historic Fertile Crescent, is being squeezed dry. More and more of the country’s irrigated lands inevitably will be abandoned, because the flow of water to Iraq is destined to decline to little more than a trickle. Not only is the flow being squeezed off, moreover, but what water does reach Iraq is of ever decreasing quality—a true “double whammy.” In the near future, the only water that will pass the border of Iraq will be the drainage from upstream—increasingly saline, contaminated with pesticides and loaded with fertilizer residues from farm runoff.

The process of diverting all useful water from the Euphrates upstream of Iraq already has begun, and is progressing rapidly. The diversion of the Tigris has just begun. Principally responsible is Turkey, whose “GAP” (Guney Anadolu Projesi) Project will capture within Turkey most of the Euphrates’ water and probably all of that from the northern reaches of the Tigris. Syria will take whatever usable Euphrates water remains, leaving some five billion to eight billion cubic meters of water for Iraq—compared with an average of some 33 billion cubic meters per year since the days of Babylon. That residual water flow, however, will be unusable—neither potable nor fit for irrigation.

Controlling the spigot is GAP. The project is as grandiose for Turkey as it is ominous for Iraq: it embraces five world-scale dams and dozens of minor dams or barrages. Like the Tennessee Valley Authority launched by President Roosevelt in the 1930s, it was advertised as the key to regional development in Turkey’s poorest and most neglected, heavily Kurdish southeastern vilayets. Hidden in the agenda, however, is Ankara’s plan to settle the newly irrigated areas with ethnic Turks. This would offset the local Kurdish and Arab populations in that very sensitive border area—a policy not of ethnic cleansing, but of ethnic dilution, akin to the Han Chinese settlement programs in Tibet and Eastern Turkestan.

With an installed capacity of 7,600 megawatts—an appreciable share of Turkey’s total capacity—GAP originally was touted as a hydropower scheme. The long-run extraction and consumptive use of Euphrates water was downplayed. But the power dams—Kerakaya and Atatuerk—are far from Turkey’s load centers, and generate electricity at full capacity only during the summer season. The real scope of the project unveiled itself only during the 1980s, when it became clear that GAP targeted the irrigation of 1.7 million hectares of new lands. Irrigation and repopulation are the primary policy goals—power is a fringe benefit.

The areas in southeastern Turkey to be newly irrigated are extensive. Four of the five large dams are indeed designed to produce power, and to help regulate the large annual fluctuations in the flow of the Euphrates. The irrigation projects are tied to the one very large Atatuerk Dam, from which emanate most of the irrigation supply canals. Water is sent to the plain to the east of the Ataturk reservoir, pumped up to the marginal land around Hilvan and Silverek, eastward toward Mardin, and—most importantly—channeled out of the basin into the Harran Plain along the border with Syria.

The GAP scheme is a sword of Damocles hanging over Iraq, but the day of reckoning has been deferred by at least 10 years, because of delays in the implementation of Turkey’s irrigation schemes and similar lags in completion of Syria’s smaller diversions based upon the Tabqa dam. Had the original construction schedules been feasible—the original, and unrealistic, completion date originally had been circa 2002—Iraq already would have lost all usable water in the Euphrates. But the extractions upstream, even if partial, have resulted in a steady increase in the salinity of what water does still flow to Iraq. Baghdad thus far has been able to offset some of this effect by diverting sweet water from the middle reaches of the Tigris into the Euphrates via a canal. That option, however, now is all but exhausted.

Iraq will not be totally bereft of water. Some 20 billion cubic meters of sweet water rise within its boundaries or along the border with Iran. The Greater and Less Zab Rivers and the Diyala feed high-quality water into the middle reaches of the Tigris River. This water has been used for irrigation in the lower Tigris, and also has in part been diverted through the Tharthar Canal across to the Euphrates to reduce the growing salinity of the flow from Turkey. But the flow of usable water from Turkey in the Tigris will diminish steadily as Stage Two of the GAP scheme embraces the diversion and use of Tigris water within Turkey.

Turkey has from time to time offered non-binding “guarantees” that certain minimum flows will be maintained. But it has resolutely refused to sign 1997’s U.N. Convention on the Law on the Non-Navigational Uses of International Water Courses. (Curiously, only China, Turkey and Burundi voted in opposition.) But the plans as announced leave only drainage water crossing its border with Syria. Indeed, there is a North American analogy: the U.S. signed an agreement with Mexico guaranteeing a minimum cross-border flow in the Lower Colorado. The Mexicans neglected to specify quality, insisting only on a specific volume, and the U.S., like Turkey, delivered only highly saline drainage water.

What are Iraq’s options? Short of war, there seem to be none. Indeed, surgical attacks on the GAP infrastructure were reviewed already some 20 years ago, when the danger became clear. Interestingly, bombing the dams from the air is both difficult and potentially counterproductive. The Israelis had worked out how to destroy the Aswan dam before the 1973 war, but this involved careful calculations of how and where and in what season to drop a nuclear weapon into Lake Nasser. Conventional explosives would be ineffective against a massive dam like Atatuerk. But commando teams, given the “right” instructions, could literally trigger self-destruction of the dam if the lip were breached in the “right” way, when the water level was highest. Such action would end GAP’s medium-term threat to Iraq.

The danger, however, is that the attack could be too successful. Forty billion cubic meters—the capacity of the reservoir—would be dumped into the old bed of the Euphrates almost instantaneously, probably wiping out the Syrian works downstream and possibly causing serious flooding in Iraq itself.

But another strategy was analyzed—one involving attacking not the dams, but the water distribution networks. In particular, the twin Sanliurfa tunnels are enticingly vulnerable. Bored through the Taurus range, they carry water from behind the Atatuerk dam to the Harran Plain. Much of the area to be newly irrigated with the diverted water is served by those tunnels. Judicious work by Iraqi demolition teams could put both out of service for many years, particularly if Iraq were to provide support for the Kirmanji Kurds and dispatch them to disrupt reconstruction efforts.

The situation is dire. Iraq is destined to lose—short of war—about three-quarters of its total flow irrigation-quality water. In addition, it will need to dispose of large volumes of saline and contaminated drainage water in both rivers coming from the GAP operations in Turkey and, secondarily, from Syria’s projects.

The water balance could become even worse: Iraq is under pressure from well-funded politico-environmentalist groups to reflood the southern marshes. Draining those swamps and recovering the lost water has been planned since the 1930s, and the central drains—most notably the “Third River”—were almost complete when the first Gulf war was launched. This positive step may be reversed. If Israeli and American forces prevail, even less water will be available for agriculture, and extensive areas in the south again will become waterlogged and saline, still further reducing agricultural output.

Thomas R. Stauffer is a Washington, DC-based engineer and economist who has taught the economics of energy and the Middle East at Harvard University and Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.