As war looms over West Asia, many of its major water bodies are already on the brink

The Islamic Republic of Iran attacked the State of Israel with missiles on the night of April 13-14, 2024, as tensions in West Asia reached an all time high.

The region has been simmering for over six months now after the October 2023 attacks by Palestinian group Hamas inside southern Israel. The Jewish state’s response has claimed the lives of over 30,000 Palestinians in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

But even as the specter of a larger war looms over the region, with the possibility of major powers becoming involved, West Asia is already over the edge in at least one respect: Water.

Most of the region’s prominent and best-known water bodies are vanishing or have already vanished in certain cases. In many instances, hydrological conflict is intertwined with the political and military and vice-versa.

As West Asia hurtles towards ‘unchartered territory’ in the aftermath of the Iranian attack, the question of water again comes to the fore as summer has just begun and this year is expected to break all records as far as temperatures go.

Dry and arid

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has just one per cent of the world’s total renewable freshwater resources, according to the Middle East Institute. This, even as the region hosts five per cent of the world’s population.

The Institute adds that MENA will be among one the hardest-hit regions of the world due to climate change according to International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections.

An article by the Brookings Institute also notes that “desertification is sweeping across the region in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Iran”.

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“Climate change can have a dilapidating impact on security and the fabric of societies by inflaming socioeconomic fractures and eroding the trust in public institutions. The problem is best summed up as interconnected crises that combine to create a domino effect of problems at the local, national, and geopolitical level,” it notes.

It urges Middle Eastern governments to “recalibrate how they make decisions about climate-related threats, taking into account the short and long-term implications of the crisis”.

Governments in the region need to take action fast, for the clock is ticking.

‘Cradles of civilisation’ no more

West Asia has been host to several ancient human civilisations. Many of them began and may have ended because of water.

The Tigris and Euphrates rivers gave rise to the civilisations of Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq) — Assyria, Akkad, Sumer and Babylon. But today, these once-mighty rivers are themselves on the brink.

“Upstream anthropogenic activity has choked the Tigris River, the connecting lifeline across Iraq, and caused the country to be plagued by poverty caused by droughts and desertification,” a paper published in Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies in August last year, noted.

Heavy rains in the middle of February 2024 put an end to the drought that had been in place since 2020. But according to experts, unless the dam building upstream on these rivers by Iraq’s neighbours Turkiye and Iran stops, Iraq will be in trouble again.

Meanwhile, the southern part of the basin has already seen destruction during the late Saddam Hussein’s regime. The dictator had got the marshes of southern Iraq drained. The two rivers meet in Al Qurnah to form the Shatt al-Arab or Arvand Rud waterway, which was the cause of the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.

Another river basin of the region — that of the Jordan — also faces its own challenges. Jordan has signed treaties with Syria and Israel on sharing of the biblical waterway’s waters. These have largely endured though the Jordan-Israel Treaty does not take Palestinian voices into account, as an article in The Conversation noted.

It also mentioned the Red Sea to Dead Sea Initiative between Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority that envisioned bring water from the Red Sea (near the ports of Aqaba and Eilat) to the Dead Sea, into which the Jordan ends. The Sea is fast vanishing and has become another symbolic reminder of the water crises in the region.

Iranian Plateau

Iran, which attacked Israel on April 13 night, is itself in the throes of a burgeoning water crisis as many of its water bodies are disappearing, leading to protests and posing a threat to the regime in Tehran.

One such recent instance was the 2021 Zayandeh Rud protests. The Zayandeh river, which ends in Lake Gavkhouni near the fabled city of Isfahan, began to dry up in the early 2000s.

In 2021, matters came to a head as protests by farmers and other people began in Isfahan city, through which the river used to flow.

According to a recent paper, “the geographical location of Iran shows that about 80% of the total area is located in an arid or semi-arid zone”.

It adds that land degradation and desertification have accelerated in Iran during the recent decades. Particularly hit is the Zayandeh Rud Basin due to factors including its geographical location, salinisation, elevation, slope, and human activities.

In the aftermath of the protests, media reports also noted that the diversion of the river for use in neighbouring Yazd province and mismanagement in this regard had caused it to dry.

Further east, Afghanistan and Iran have a history of friction over sharing the waters of the Helmand river, which rises in the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan, crosses the border and ends in Lake Hamoun.

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In May last year, at least three people were killed and several other were injured after Iranian and Afghan troops exchanged gunfire on the border between the two countries, amid tensions between Kabul and Tehran over the sharing of waters of the Helmand.

Meanwhile, the two inlets of the Indian Ocean that are part of West Asia — the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, also face challenges which have come to the fore since the October attacks by Hamas.

Both are connected to the Indian Ocean by straits — Bab el Mandeb and Hormuz. These are choke points where conflict or geopolitical tensions can pose a direct threat to global supply chains.

This has been seen in the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea and now, the Iranian capture of an Israel-flagged ship in the Strait of Hormuz.

According to a recent article, “As the implications of climate change for security and stability transcend political and national borders, actions and solutions require a collaborative effort. The climate crisis, thereby, forces non-traditional partners to cooperate and could present opportunities to overcome historic grievances, promote trust-building and improve relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors through economic and environmental cooperation.”

At this moment though, peace has sadly taken a backseat. Even as the worst may perhaps be yet to come — politically, militarily and hydrologically.