Vital River Is Withering, and Iraq Has No Answer
Holly Pickett for The New York Times
A man submerged himself in water from a tank during evening prayers at a temple in Basra, Iraq, because the river-fed canal outside was too polluted.
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
Published: June 12, 2010
SIBA, Iraq — The Shatt al Arab, the river that flows from the biblical site of the Garden of Eden to the Persian Gulf, has turned into an environmental and economic disaster that Iraq’s newly democratic government is almost powerless to fix.
Withered by decades of dictatorial mismanagement and then neglect, by drought and the thirst of Iraq’s neighbors, the river formed by the convergence of the Tigris and the Euphrates no longer has the strength the keep the sea at bay.
The salt water of the gulf now pushes up the Faw peninsula. Last year, for the first time in memory, it extended beyond Basra, Iraq’s biggest port city, and even Qurna, where the two rivers meet. It has ravaged fresh-water fisheries, livestock, crops and groves of date palms that once made the area famous, forcing the migration of tens of thousands of farmers.
In a land of hardship and resignation and deep faith, the disaster along the Shatt al Arab appears to some as the work of a higher power. “We can’t control what God does,” said Rashid Thajil Mutashar, the deputy director of water resources in Basra.
But man has had a hand in the river’s decline. Turkey,Syria and Iran have all harnessed the headwaters that flow into the Tigris and Euphrates and ultimately into the Shatt al Arab, leaving Iraqi officials with little to do but plead for them to release more from their modern networks of dams.
The environment problem became particularly acute last year when Iran cut the flow entirely from the Karun River, which meets the Shatt south of Basra, for 10 months. The flow resumed after the winter rains, but at a fraction of earlier levels.
In the 1980s Iran and Iraq fought over the Shatt al Arab, which forms the southernmost border between the countries and is still littered with the rusting hulks of sunken ships from that war. Now, despite improved relations after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the river has once again become a source of diplomatic tension.
“The water is from God,” said Mohammed Sadoon, a farmer and fisherman in the village of Abu Khasib, who sold two water buffaloes last year because he could no longer provide them with potable water from the Shatt. “They shouldn’t seize it from us.”
Iraq’s minister of water resources, Abdul Latif Jamal Rashid, said that the environmental problems and the disputes over water rights were a lingering legacy of dictatorship.
Mr. Hussein diverted the southerly flow of water into a trench during the war with Iran and drained the marshlands of southern Iraq in the 1990s. His belligerence toward Iraq’s neighbors also left the country isolated — and then weakened — when those countries built their dams, siphoning off what for millenniums flowed through Mesopotamia, the land of the two rivers.
“Iraq was in a position neither to reject nor to cooperate with them,” he said in an interview in his office in Baghdad. “They did what they wanted to do.”
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