Foreign
Affairs has a recommendable piece on the water wars between Turkey,
Syria and Iraq: Rivers of Babylon.
Turkey has
build many, many dams throughout the country to provide electricity
but also for farming. When I traveled in the Turkish east in the
1990s many new projects, parts of the Southeastern Anatolia Project
(GAP) were visible and newly dammed water was provided to the dry
regions in the south-east through open channels. A lot of this water
was wasted due to vaporization but also due to the choice of water
intensive news crops in a hot and often desert like region.
The water
newly provided to farmers in Turkey used to flow down the Euphrates
and Tigris to Syria and Iraq. Three drought years in Syria,
2006-2009, induced many farmers to leave their dry field and to move
to cities where they found little work:
[...]
The lack of
water is not the only reason for the wars in Syria and Iraq. But it
made these countries prone to inner conflicts and vulnerable to
outside meddling.
But the
governments of Syria and Iraq can do little to help their farmers.
While there are agreements about a minimum waterflow between Turkey,
Syria and Iraq there is no ways Syria and Iraq could actually press
Turkey to deliver the agreed upon waterflow.
[...]
Missing in
the Foreign Affairs piece is another Turkish project which diverts
even more water away from its southern neighbors. In 1974 Turkey
invaded and since occupied the north of Cyprus. The occupied parts
of the island were ethnically cleansed of Greek people and as many as
150,000 Turks were transferred from Turkey and settled on their land.
Turkey has
now built a pipeline to provide water from onshore Turkey to the
Turkish occupied part of the island:
Read
full article:
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