Syria’s Kurds meanwhile have accused their arch-foe Turkey of weaponizing the Euphrates, accusing it of deliberately holding back water to spark a drought, which Ankara denies.

Iraq and Syria say Turkey’s dam-building has resulted in a drastic reduction of the water flowing through their lands.īaghdad regularly asks Ankara to release more water to counter drought, but Turkey’s ambassador to Iraq, Ali Riza Guney, ruffled feathers last July when he said, “water is largely wasted in Iraq”. More recently, in 2019, the ancient town of Hasankeyf on the Tigris was submerged to make way for the massive Ilisu Dam.

In 1990 it completed the huge Ataturk Dam on the Euphrates River, just 80 kilometers (50 miles) from Syria’s border. Turkey launched the construction of a gigantic complex of dams and hydroelectric plants across the southeast in the 1980s. Long used to drilling for oil, war-scarred Iraq is now digging ever deeper for water as a frenzy of dam-building, mainly in Turkey, sucks water out of the region’s two great rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. Sudan and Egypt, however, see the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam as a threat to their water supplies – Egypt alone relies on the Nile for about 97% of its irrigation and drinking water.Įthiopia has insisted the dam will not disturb the flow of water and turned on the first turbine in February 2020. In 2011, Addis Ababa launched a $4.2 billion hydroelectric project on the river, which it sees as essential to lighting up rural Ethiopia. The waters of Africa’s longest river, the Nile, are at the center of a decade-long dispute between Ethiopia – where the Nile’s biggest tributary, the Blue Nile, rises – and its downstream neighbors Sudan and Egypt. With half the world experiencing water scarcity for at least part of the year, the huge dams being built by some countries to boost their power supplies while their neighbors go parched are a growing source of potential conflict.Īhead of a UN conference in New York on global access to water, AFP looks at five mega-projects with very different consequences, depending on whether you live upstream or downstream.

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