“We sold everything,” Abu Mehdi said, but “it was a failure.” The farmer went into debt to dig a 30-meter well to try to get water. Without water, we can’t live in these areas at all.” “We were displaced by the war” against Iran in the 1980s, he said, “and now we are going to be displaced because of water. “We will be forced to give up farming and sell our animals,” said Abu Mehdi, 42, who wears a white djellaba robe. This year authorities have been forced to reduce Iraq’s cultivated areas by half, meaning no crops will be grown in the badly-hit Diyala Governorate. Before, the water was pouring in torrents,” he said, but over the last two or three years “there is less water every day.”Īccording to Iraqi official statistics, the level of the Tigris entering Iraq has dropped to just 35 percent of its average over the past century. “All our work, our agriculture, depends on it. “Our life depends on the Tigris,” said farmer Pibo Hassan Dolmassa, 41, wearing a dusty coat, in the town of Faysh Khabur. The Tigris’ journey through Iraq begins in the mountains of autonomous Kurdistan, near the borders of Türkiye and Syria, where local people raise sheep and grow potatoes. The Tigris, the lifeline connecting the storied cities of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra, has been choked by dams and decreasing rainfall. Hellish summers see the mercury top a blistering 50 degrees Celsius -near the limit of human endurance - with frequent power cuts shutting down air-conditioning for millions. Iraq may be oil-rich but the country is plagued by poverty after decades of war and by droughts and desertification.īattered by one natural disaster after another, it is one of the five countries most exposed to climate change, according to the U.N.įrom April on, temperatures exceed 35 degrees and intense sandstorms often turn the sky orange, covering the country in a film of dust. Human activity and climate change have choked its once mighty flow through Iraq, where - with its twin river the Euphrates - it made Mesopotamia a cradle of civilization thousands of years ago.
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