May 6. (EUROPE PRESS) –
Iraq’s Prime Minister Mohamed al Sudani has openly acknowledged that the country is contemplating developing a large-scale desalination process to combat critical drought in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
“The Government is working to form a High Council for Water and is determined to lead a process of desalination of seawater,” Al Sudani explained this Saturday during the Third International Water Conference in Baghdad.
Al Sudani has warned that “water scarcity is a threat to the culture and civilization of the country, as well as the populations of both rivers around which the most important civilizations in the world were built.”
The drought is the product of multiple factors beginning in Turkey, on Iraq’s northern border, whose network of dams has choked the headwaters of both rivers, and continuing in Iran, which diverts some of their tributaries.
As a direct consequence, northern and central Iraq are taking a huge percentage of an already restricted supply as activists denounce an abuse of the practice of irrigation. All of this, added together, culminates in the severe droughts that regularly hit the southern regions.
The Government considers that water scarcity is an absolute priority and “we must identify the existing problems with the countries upstream (Iran and Turkey) to distribute our water correctly”, according to the Iraqi prime minister, in statements collected by the official agency INA Iraqi News.
In recent weeks, Iraqi delegations have visited both countries in an attempt to ensure a more equitable sharing of water. However, and despite the good prospects, Al Sudani has recognized that the drought in Iraq will require “all the efforts of the international friends” of the country, to “urgently help” Iraq in the fight against water insecurity. .
It should be recalled that a report by the Ministry of Water Resources published late last year concluded that unless urgent action is taken to combat declining water levels, Iraq’s two main rivers will be completely dry by 2040.
The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) has long warned that Iraq’s water availability will decline by around 20 percent by 2025, threatening the long-term stability of the agricultural and industrial sectors. .
