QALADIZA: A river flowing through Iraq’s northern Kurdistan has all but dried up, prompting warnings of an “environmental catastrophe” for the water-stressed border city as it tussles for the resource with neighboring Iran.
The Little Zab originates in neighboring Iran and flows through the outskirts of Qaladiza, a hillside town of 90,000 residents around 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the Iranian border, which uses its water for drinking as well as irrigating crops and farmland along its path.
But the effects of climate change and dam building across the border have left it greatly diminished.
A tributary of the mighty Tigris, the river used to carry seven billion cubic meters of water a year, yet the volume has shrunk dramatically in recent years, said Marf Karim, director of a water treatment facility serving Qaladiza.
He pinned much of the blame on the Kolsa dam, built on the Iranian stretch of the Little Zab in 2017.
“We monitor water levels every day,” Karim told AFP. “With the naked eye we can see a decrease of about 80 percent.”
The plummeting river levels have exposed the river’s grey, rocky bed to the scorching summer sun.
“It’s an environmental catastrophe” affecting the entire region, including its water wells and groundwater reserves, said Karim.
To ensure Qaladiza residents have potable water, a small makeshift dam has been constructed near the town to ensure it retains more of the river’s water. But it does little to solve “the problem of water quality” in the shrinking waterway, he said.
“We need more products to filter out impurities,” he said.
Beset by climate change, Iraq has endured years of drought, rising temperatures and declining rainfall.
But in Qaladiza’s case, resource diplomacy is also at play, exacerbating geopolitical fault lines and regional tensions as growing populations place increasing demands on a dwindling supply of water.
Iran itself is also enduring the effects of worsening conditions.
In June 2023, the meteorological department of Iran’s West Azerbaijan province, which borders Iraq, said “about 56 percent” of its territory was “affected by very severe drought.”
Several dams have been built since the 1990s, but “in 2017 Iran realized that it was still losing some two-thirds of its waters into Iraq, which could then lead into a problem of water shortage inside Iran by 2036,” said Banafsheh Keynoush, a visiting fellow at the Kroc Institute at US university Notre Dame.
Tehran then moved to construct more than 100 dams “to redirect this extra water flow into Iraq, into its own dam reservoirs,” she told AFP.
Iraq, too, has been building dams and trying to reduce demand, including by encouraging farmers to abandon traditional irrigation methods deemed wasteful, all while seeking a greater portion of the water resources it shares with its ally Iran.
Tehran has factored “its water disputes with Iraq into its larger geopolitical calculations,” said Keynoush.
“Progress on resolving these water issues has also been subjected to political and geopolitical negotiations” involving both Baghdad and Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region, added the expert.
In November, for example, “Iran decided to release some water into the Zab... just to minimize some tensions with the Kurdistan regional government,” Keynoush noted.
It is “vital” for Iran to prevent any “major upheavals” on its borders, politically but also environmentally, she said.
Qaladiza governor Bakr Baez said water disputes are “essentially a political problem,” but failed attempts to resolve them have had dire real-life consequences.
Farmers now do not have enough water to irrigate their fields, and the vast majority of the area’s 257 fish farms have been affected by the shortages, according to Baez.
Kochar Jamal, the manager of an Iraqi dam downstream, downplayed the impact of the Iranian “cuts” on the water reservoirs he oversees.
This year, water levels at the Dukan dam rose compared to 2023, Jamal said, attributing the increase to greater “amounts of rain in winter and spring.”
To keep his fish alive, Qaladiza farmer Ali Hassan has begun digging in the hopes of reaching the water table.
“It’s been three days that we haven’t been able to change the water in the tanks,” said the man in his 50s, standing next to a large digger that was burrowing into the ground.
“Without it, the water will heat up, the fish will die. They need fresh water.”
Losing his fish would also mean a financial loss of at least $13,000, said Hassan.
Driving the digger is another farmer, 48-year-old Omar Mohamed, who said water shortages meant “we can no longer cultivate anything.”
“I’ve had orchards, they’re gone,” he said.
“A neighbor tried to plant okra, another, watermelon. They all failed.”
