Wednesday, October 8, 2014
Islamic State jihadists using water as a weapon in Iraq
BAGHDAD — The Islamic State militants
who have rampaged across northern Iraq are increasingly using water as a
weapon, cutting off supplies to villages resisting their rule and
pressing to expand their control over the country’s water
infrastructure.
The threat from the
jihadists is so critical that US forces are bombing the militants close
to both the Mosul and Haditha dams — Iraq’s largest — on a near-daily
basis. But the radical Islamists continue to menace both facilities.
The Sunni militants want to seize the dams to
bolster their claim they are building an actual state; the dams are key
to irrigating the country’s vast wheat fields and providing Iraqis with
electricity. More ominously, the Islamic State has used its control over
water facilities — including as many as four dams along the Tigris and
Euphrates rivers — to displace communities or deprive them of crucial
water supplies.
The Islamic State
‘‘understands how powerful water is as a tool, and they are not afraid
to use it,’’ said Michael Stephens, a Middle East specialist and deputy
director of the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based security
studies think tank.
‘‘A lot of effort has been expended to control resources in Iraq in a way not seen in other conflicts,’’ he added.
Water has long played a role in armed
struggle, from the Allied bombing of German dams during World War II to
Saddam Hussein’s draining of Iraq’s southern marshes in the 1990s to
punish residents for an antigovernment rebellion.
But
the idea of a radical, nonstate group gaining authority over critical
water infrastructure has raised particular worry. The White House was so
alarmed in August when Islamic State fighters briefly seized the Mosul
Dam — located on the Tigris River that runs through Baghdad — that it
backed a major operation by Iraqi and Kurdish forces to wrest it back.
‘‘If
that dam was breached, it could have proven catastrophic, with floods
that would have threatened the lives of thousands of civilians and
endangered our embassy compound in Baghdad,’’ President Obama said on
Aug. 18, the day Iraqi forces retook the structure.
Having
nurtured the world’s first civilizations along the Fertile Crescent —
the ancient strip of food-bearing land that arced across the Middle East
— Iraq’s Tigris and Euphrates rivers remain the lifeblood of Iraq’s
agricultural life. They also generate its electricity and provide water
that is piped in to households.
But water
levels in Iraq have fallen in recent years because of decreased
rainfall, heavy water use, and other factors, the United Nations says.
According to the world body, the flow of the Euphrates is expected to
decline by more than 50 percent by 2025. By then, Iraq could already be
suffering from a shortage of 33 billion cubic meters of water per year,
UN officials say.
‘‘The country does not
have enough [water], and shortages have been huge economic — and thus
political — problems for several years now,’’ said Kenneth Pollack, an
expert on Middle Eastern military affairs at the Brookings Institution.
Any attempts by the Islamic State to cut flows ‘‘would be enormously
damaging,’’ he said.
The Sunni extremists
of the Islamic State say Shi’ite Muslims are apostates. In Iraq, the
militants accuse the Shi’ite population of backing a sectarian
government that has oppressed Sunnis.
Recently,
a local official in Diyala province said Islamic State militants
flooded nine villages in the Shirwain area by diverting water from
nearby rivers, in order to prevent the advance of Iraqi security forces.
‘‘We
are in a conflict with the Islamic State over water in Iraq. They want
to control it at any price,’’ said Abdul Majid Satar, the minister of
agriculture and water resources for the Kurdistan Regional Government,
which administers a semi-autonomous area in northern Iraq.
‘‘They can threaten many parts of the country if they control the water,’’ Satar said.
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