_This transcript is from a CSIS event hosted on March 11, 2025._ [_Watch the full video here_](https://www.csis.org/events/thirst-power-overcoming-politics-water-middle-east)_._
Ms. Hall: Good morning and good afternoon to those on the other side of the pond. Welcome to our launch event for the report _The Thirst for Power: Overcoming the Politics of Water in the Middle East_. We're really excited to have you with us. Thanks to everyone joining during this very chaotic news cycle. My name is Natasha Hall. I'm a senior fellow with the Middle East program at CSIS and I'm leading the program on _Water and the Future of the Middle East_.
Today, we're going to talk about an issue that is an existential one for tens of millions of people in the region, which is water insecurity. That issue has, once again, been overcome by the news of the day, yet in that news, we see water insecurity everywhere. Just a month ago, Turkish-backed armed groups in northern Syria threatened the Tishrin Dam. Israel recently occupied the upstream waters of a dam that Syria and Jordan share, and Israel has destroyed desalination and wastewater treatment plants in Gaza and restricted the fuel Palestinians need to pump and treat water. And then at the more basic level, many in the region barely have enough clean water to survive on a daily basis. Many Yemenis in Sana'a only have access to three liters of water a day; Americans by comparison typically use 380 liters a day.
The divide between the water haves and have-nots is growing and it's putting enormous strain on peace and stability in the region. But despite—and even because of—this reality, putting off solutions for a better day is no longer possible. It’s with that in mind that we decided to work on this this edited volume, which was available on the website as well. We picked some of the most complex cases in the region to do a deep dive into the obstacles to improving water security, and we tried to identify ways to manage or work around the politics inherent in doing so. The report includes northeastern Syria, Jordan, southern Iraq, and the Yemeni highlands.
Gaza was also supposed to be one of the case studies. I was meant to go to Gaza on October 14, 2023. And once again, as if to underline our point, the conflict obliterated our ability to address water insecurity in a constructive and forward-looking way. Yet simultaneously, the war laid bare Palestinians' water insecurity. As I mentioned, Israel cut off water to the strip, destroyed water and sanitation infrastructure, and restricted fuel. Polio spread. Waterborne diseases skyrocketed. And water insecurity in Gaza, as in much of the Middle East, was a sign of deeper dysfunction even prior to the war.
Today, we're going to try to get at the root of that dysfunction in all of these case studies but hopefully leave you with some hope, I hope. If we can't today, I do encourage you to read the report, which is full of very cynical realism, but also tangible, executable recommendations that I hope you will share.
We have an incredible panel today, and I'm really honored to have everyone. First, we have Ciarán Ó Cuinn, the director of MEDRC, the sole surviving institution of the Middle East Peace Process, mandated to use environmental issues in the service of a peace process. We have Robyn Savage, the director of the NES Forum, or the Northeast Syria Forum, and longtime humanitarian coordinator. She's going to give us some updates on the situation in northeast Syria, which is rapidly changing given recent events that toppled the Assad regime and ongoing sanctions and aid cuts.
Dr. Neda Zawahri is a professor at the Department of Political Science at Cleveland State University. She's also one of our advisory board members for the _Water and the Future of the Middle East_ project, and apparently one of my long-lost relatives. And we will later be joined by Ambassador Hassan Janabi, who has worn many hats in the Iraqi government, including as the minister of water and ambassador to Turkey. Without further ado, I want to get started with Syria, Robyn, and prompt you with a question that is on a lot of people's minds when it comes to northeast Syria, where we've been talking a lot about water issues over the past few years: what are the main challenges to water and sanitation in northeastern Syria? And are there any possible solutions you think to this?
Ms. Savage: Thanks, Natasha, and I appreciate everyone joining today. I think we need to be incredibly realistic that water is a political instrument and it's one that's been weaponized in northeast Syria for years. Realistically, in terms of population size and need, we're looking at effectively 3 million people in northeast Syria. 2.5 million at this point are considered people in need by humanitarian standards.
If you look at Hasakah Governorate, 610,000 people directly rely on Alouk water station. Our advocacy at the forum and our engagement through our different humanitarian working groups for years now has been around the need to re-operationalize Alouk water station, which has been cut off through a political game with Turkey. That water is the only at-scale livable solution for the people of Hasakah in northeast Syria.
Two years ago, when we began having this conversation at senior officials' meetings and so on and so forth, we were discussing Alouk. Unfortunately, we're now also discussing Tishrin, as you mentioned in your intro, a dam which has been non-operational since the recent escalation surrounding the fall of Assad and has become a bit of an operational tool between the SNA and the different factions fighting around that area. Now that dam in and of itself, if it were to break, would be an immediate risk to life at a catastrophic level that would be war crime level.
It's very important to note that not only are we talking about the subsistence living of people when it comes to northeast Syria and their access to water—what they need in order to meet their basic hygiene needs, meet their water intake—but also meet their electricity needs, also meet their ability to use the green belt of northeast Syria for that which it was intended, which was the food basket. None of these things can be accomplished in the absence of this water.
If you just look alone at the humanitarian need right now in NES, you'll see that the living situations are dire. People are living in camps. We have 10 camps and we have over, effectively at this point, 125,000 people in those camps reliant on humanitarian water services. The United States alone had $117 million of humanitarian funding in northeast Syria that went offline with the recent freeze and now the termination of funding. The water services attached to that cannot be understated.
We're looking now at a population of effectively 100,000 in the Kobani region, 610,000 in the Alouk region, we're looking at the Tishrin level of impact being 170,000 people, all trying to meet their basic water needs through secondary mechanisms, such as water trucking. Water trucking is really depleting the boreholes to a point that the largest borehole upon which the governorate relies in Hasakah is at a critical level. And a large subset of those that are in the region are directly producing contaminants or testing below standard levels, creating immediate health impacts.
2024 humanitarian assistance for water trucking for the Alouk population—the 610,000—was at $3.5 million, and that only met 20 percent of that population's needs. And so, while we can talk about the alternatives—the solar panels that have been invested in since the escalations around the attacks on critical civilian infrastructure over the last year—those solar panels are the answer to a lack of electricity to be able to pump boreholes. But ultimately, what we're trying to solve is a political problem. A political problem that is playing out across the entire region, as I know other speakers will speak to, but there is no alternative for Alouk. And we are running out of time in northeast Syria to even mitigate the impacts of what we're seeing.
The impacts on health as an outcome as well, not only directly communicable diseases, but the fact that we no longer have the health care system we relied upon with the U.S. funding cuts means that the systemic and broad ranging nature of access to water and the needs that it meets are not only critical—they're at the end of a line of a long effort to find mitigation, one to which we've not been able to serve. So, I would just simply say, we need Alouk back online. We need to be testing all of the boreholes that are still being overused and make sure that we're not further contaminating any individual reliant on that water. And finally, we need to support a pipeline of Euphrates water into Hasakah Governorate. Beyond that, there are no other solutions. Thank you.
Ms. Hall: Thank you so much, Robyn. A grim picture. I should note that it was Lyse Mauvais who wrote the Syria chapter and much of the issues that she speaks about in the chapters is things that Robyn alluded to, but now with no aid and ongoing tensions in the region. So, a really grim picture, but thank you for providing potential solutions for those who are listening. I think with that, we'll go further downstream to Iraq. Thank you, Ambassador Hassan, for joining us. You had actually very tangible solutions in the chapter that you wrote for us, but could we start with how did Iraq get to this point as a relatively water-abundant country? And what do you see as the main challenges now? What are the consequences of the status quo as well?
Amb. Janabi: Iraq, of course, used to be a water-rich country. It's not anymore, unfortunately, and the water has started to decline over the last 40 years. It has reached a very critical level right now. There's a combination of factors, both internal and external. It is externally important because more than 70 percent of our water comes from outside. Starting in the mid-70s, Iraq's neighbor embarked on implementing intensive dam-building programs in the upper reaches of the Euphrates and later Tigris.
The last major dam that has been constructed on the Tigris in Turkey became operational in 2020, so just recently, and there are also more dams planned on the upper reaches. Over the years—40 years or so—more than a hundred billion cubic meters of storage capacity has been built outside Iraq. You can imagine that this is now a hundred billion cubic meters stored outside Iraq that used to come to Iraq freely. That's why we used to be water-rich.
Then internally, you all know Iraq and what it has gone through. Bad policies led to wars. Wars caused widespread destruction of water infrastructure and the environment. The then-government’s repression in the 90s also led to the drain of the vast Iraqi marshes. This draining of the marshes changed a lot; it changed the natural status of water in the south, damaging the environment, impoverishing people, displacing the marsh inhabitants. It has changed the dynamics in the south, causing saltwater intrusion from the Gulf to Shatt al-Arab. And this, of course, has devastated agriculture. Agriculture economies basically ceased to function, whether it's crops, orchards, or fish.
The other internal factor that's also significant to me is water governance. The water sector in Iraq is fragmented: there are too many stakeholders that don't coordinate with each other, and there are decades-long reforms in the water and agriculture sector that have not been done, so it led to stagnation and reduced productivity. If you can imagine, for example, one dollop of land—agricultural land— that's 2,500 square meters, the production of that used to be 1.5 tons, for example, of grain, which is now reduced to nearly 400 kilograms. This is because of the bad quality of the water, and also the salinization and soil. Then, of course, climate change. The effect of climate change in Iraq right now is formidable. Iraq, then, suffers a lot of vulnerabilities. Politically, economically, environmentally, et cetera.
The decline in water availability caused a noticeable shrinking in the green cover, triggering a rapid expansion of desertification and the devastation of rural fertile soils. In other words, the human-induced disturbance of the water cycle, represented by over-control by other countries, as well as Iraq of course, and war destruction, and of course the everyday operations or yearly operations of these major hydraulic structures that magnified the impact of climate change.
And vice versa, of course, it is very dynamic; when you have a desert instead of water, when you don't have these forests of trees and palm trees and what have you, of course, the heat in the summertime gets elevated to unprecedented values.
Then, in the post-2003 era, we had the occupation and what followed of international intervention in Iraq which also triggered major terrorism attacks on civilian infrastructure, with water infrastructure being specifically targeted. ISIS, or Daesh, occupied Mosul Dam—the biggest dam in the country—and tried to sabotage the operation of the dam. They could not blow it up, but they destroyed electrical and mechanical systems in the dam. They also destroyed very famous and significant barrages, the Ramadi Barrage and Fallujah Barrage on the Euphrates. And in fact, when I was minister of water resources, I had to attend to these damages and we successfully managed to get them back to work. This is yet another grim picture of water in Iraq. And it is very, very evident in the southern part of Iraq.
Ms. Hall: Thank you so much, Ambassador Hassan. We’ll get to the solutions that you mentioned in the report in the next round of questions, because some of the solutions you have are more limited, but also more feasible and necessary for southern Iraq. Now, we'll go back to Jordan. I really encourage everyone to read Dr. Zawahri's chapter on Jordan. Some might have been surprised that in an edited volume, seemingly about conflict-affected countries, we chose Jordan, which is not undergoing a war or has. But the reality is that Jordan is constantly impacted by the conflicts around it and by the ongoing tensions as well, which, Neda, you allude to in your chapter. Maybe we could take a step back and you could tell us how dire the water insecurity situation really is for Jordan. We've heard a lot about Jordan being one of the most water scarce countries in the world, but if you could also tell us about some of the failed and successful efforts to shore up water security in Jordan over the years.
Dr. Zawahri: Thank you, Natasha. As you mentioned, Jordan really is the second most water-scarce country in the world. If you look at the available renewable water per capita, it's only 61 cubic meters, where the threshold marking absolute water security is 500 cubic meters. Now if we consider the country's total demand for water currently, it's 1,158 million cubic meters, but the supply that's available for the leadership is 977 million cubic meters. So, for decades, Jordan has operated on an annual water budget deficit that is only expected to increase due to its heavy exposure to climate change. It's an already dry country and climate change is impacting it significantly because of droughts.
Also, there's a heavy dependence on unpredictable transboundary water supplies. And the population, as you mentioned, Natasha, is growing significantly due to both natural population growth rates and also through an influx of refugees into the country from conflict-affected neighboring states. Analysts project that due to the combination of all these factors, Jordan's water demand is set to increase to 2000 million cubic meters per year by 2040. That does not take into account additional floods of refugees if there are other conflicts in the region.
Currently, with the past couple of decades, the way Jordan has managed this water deficit is by cutting supplies to farmers, cutting supplies to the municipal sector, drilling unsustainably, and begging for water from its neighboring states. The other thing it has done is buy water—additional water beyond the peace treaty—from Israel, and that water is not completely reliable because there are possibilities, when there is tension in the region, that that supply can be decreased. In terms of some of the failed attempts at improving Jordan's water supply, Jordan has sought to expand its supply of desperately needed water by building major infrastructure through transboundary agreements. Agreements with, for example, the Israelis and the Palestinians, agreements with Syria, and those have not gone as well.
If you look at a couple of projects, for example, the Red Sea-Dead Sea Canal Project, which Jordan has envisioned for decades and finally came very close to it: there was an agreement between the Israelis, the Jordanians, and the Palestinians to pump water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. And that project decreased throughout the negotiations, but at least something was getting close to happening. But what happened was, ultimately, Israel lost interest in the project, environmental movements put pressure against the project, and it was so prolonged and there was no movement on the project, that the Jordanians ultimately gave up on it.
The second project that they attempted was between Israel, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates. This involved exchanging water for energy, and Israel was to build a desalinization plant to sell Jordan water, whereas Jordan would build solar energy plants, and it would sell it to Israel. It looked pretty optimistic that it was going to go ahead until bilateral relations deteriorated, and in November of 2023, Jordan could not proceed with the project. It withdrew. The project appears to be on hold at the moment.
The other thing that Jordan has attempted to do is to use bilateral agreements to augment its water supply. It tried to do that with Syria since the early 1950s until the present, and that also did not go well because with every round of negotiations with the Syrians, Jordan wanted to build a dam. The size of the dam would then decrease and Syria’s consumption from the Yarmouk would increase. Ultimately, by the time the dam was constructed and built in 2006, its size was a lot smaller and it never actually, until today, reached full capacity.
The other transboundary issue is with Israel. Water was part of the peace negotiations and part of the peace treaty. When the treaty was signed, the Jordanians thought they were going to gain so much from the water due to these ambiguities in the treaties and the failure to implement parts of the treaties, such as a desalination plant and water storage capacities in the lower Jordan River. Jordan did not really gain the amount of water that it had wanted to, and expected to, gain from the treaty, so it only gained a fraction.
The other things that have been failures are overconsumption of water and inefficiencies in the domestic management of the water resources, and due to the nature of the state-society relationship on one end, and due to the power of political elites on the other end, the bureaucrats' ability to rein in this overconsumption has been very limited. So those are examples of failure.
Examples of successes in Jordan would be the treated wastewater. Jordan in the capital treats its wastewater and it sends it into the Azraq River and that water goes on to the King Abdullah Canal, where it's used by farmers as it flows through the river, and it's mixed with fresh water. And in the canal, it's mixed with rainwater and fresh water, and it's used by farmers. So, Jordan has been successful in doing that.
The other thing is that Jordan has an intermittent water distribution system. On one end, that water distribution system is old, that water distribution system is leaking, and it doesn't give sufficient water supply to a lot of people in the municipal sector because, you know, they get water once a week. But on the other end, that intermittent distribution system forces families to be highly efficient in using the water. So, I would argue that the poor and the middle-income class, because of this intermittent distribution system, are extremely efficient in using their water resources.
For the rich, they have the extra resources, the financial means, the disposable income to go out and buy the additional water supply. So, in that sense, we have inefficiencies. Jordan has also been successful at fixing leakages in its water distribution system. It's quite old, the distribution system, as many countries in the Middle East need to update their water distribution system. The other thing that is successful is recently Jordan was able to increase the price of water paid by the municipal sector without having protests. And that's a huge advantage in the country being able to accomplish that, because previously, every time it raised the price of water, whether it was on bread, on rice, on water, on electricity, there were protests in the street. So, that's the situation. Thank you.
Ms. Hall: Thank you so much, Neda. And the tariff increase that you were speaking about is a gradual one, so we haven't seen that at a high end of it yet, but hopefully the transparency that the government was having with the people about it will lead to less protests. I wanted to ask you, Ciarán, you've been dealing with some thorny issues in Ireland and in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for many, many years. And obviously, things are changing at a rapid clip. Even what is talked about now with regards to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is miles away from anything that we had actually even thought about before.
I wanted you to help us conceptualize the idea of this entire report, which is that it's very difficult to work around the politics of water and security with technical fixes. I wondered if you could talk about how does, in your experience, water and security manifest and exacerbate conflict and inequality? I would also like to hear about tangible examples that you've seen of engineers or technocrats attempting to find these technical solutions to political problems and potentially failing as a result.
Mr. Ó Cuinn: Thank you, Natasha, and thank you to everybody who wrote the report. It's very, very good and really, really useful. I suppose the dominant, particularly Western view of water and peace and water and conflict has been that if water insecurity arises that leads to conflict and risk of water wars. And linked to this was the idea that if you just do sectoral, narrow cooperation or technical cooperation on water that peace will somehow magically erupt or that you can simply do technical apolitical interventions to fix these issues and then peace emerges.
That traditional view is wrong in conflict resolution. Why? Because there's never been a water war. There's never been a water war between states for all the talk of it, it's never happened. In the study of peace processes, water is considered a dependent variable. The shape of water cooperation comes from international relations, comes from a peace settlement, comes from a hydro-political tradition, rather than the other way around. Water isn't a normative driver. Historically, we haven't really seen that.
Water can be used for war as much as peace. I mean, if we look Ukraine, for example, we've seen how water has been used for war, much more than peace. And we don't actually have one case ever of water cooperation stopping a war. It’s a very Eurocentric idea that when people in Africa or people in Asia have a difficulty over water, it leads to war. I mean, that's not true.
Instead, we need to see the existence of water insecurity and inequality as a crucial sign of political dysfunction, inequality, or a hierarchy of humanity that underpins conflict. So, water is almost a litmus test or the canary in the coal mine for an emerging conflict, which hierarchies of humanity and unfair power-sharing actually leads to. And it's a very Eurocentric idea, that old idea. When there's no water in the south of Spain, a pipe is built from the north of the south of Spain, there’s no war. In Ireland, Dublin is about to run out of water. We're building a pipeline from the Shannon River, it's fine.
In Oman, parts of the UAE and Iran for thousands of years, they've had these hydro-political systems like the Falaj system, based on equity, to spread water in areas of huge water crisis where water sometimes doesn't come for years. So, where there is social cohesion and no hierarchy of humanity, water stress does not start wars. It's the existence of the political rather than the water that causes the issue.
Now, this is particularly evident in Palestine and Israel. And I'll touch on two things here. One is how the water issue is a function of politics and the conflict. And second, how the process design of the peace process itself for four decades has directed external intervention away from the core of the conflict, including ways of actually dealing with the water issues, because these are core to the conflict. The core issue of the conflict between the Jordan River and the sea is that there's 14 million human beings, about half of whom have national self-determination and half of whom don't. That's the core of the conflict. Water is not the core of the conflict. Water is a byproduct of the conflict. And all the water in the world and all the non-revenue water and all the desalination plants, without self-determination, won't fix the conflict. It’s very, very important to recognize that.
The rules of water in the West Bank are baked into Oslo, too. And the internal agreement that was supposed to last until 1999 in the West Bank, Palestinians have access to about 15 percent of the water resource. They have to purchase the rest from Israel. In the West Bank, I think the World Bank recently or a couple of years ago said that about 57 percent of the drinking water in the West Bank has to be bought from Israel. For Gaza, it’s important to say that Gaza is a political entity. Gaza is not a naturally occurring environmental hinterland or area. Gaza in 1947, 46, 45, 44 was a town of about 35,000. In 1948, it takes in 200,000 people, now there's 2.2, 2.3 million people. In the 1930s, Tel Aviv had saline water, because when you have a lot of people in a small area in an arid environment and you're just using wells, the water gets salty very, very quick.
So it is with Gaza. So, Gaza is a political construct. It wouldn't exist in the shape it has without war, without politics. And that's why it is at the moment. Israel today controls all that goes in and goes out, including fuel, and water in Gaza is 100 percent a function of energy. You need wells to get the water out of the ground. You need an element of brackish desalination to make the water drinkable or potable. There's no water out of the ground in Gaza that a human being can safely drink. Every now and again you'll see a statistic—96 percent, 97 percent, 1 percent—impossible. When you go to Gaza before the war, if you're in the shower and the water goes on your lip, it's salty. You cannot drink the water without energy. So, these water issues are 100 percent a function of politics. These are not naturally occurring issues, they are 100 percent a function of politics.
The structure of the process itself, the Middle East peace process, going back to the early 70s, has funneled international external intervention and the international community's efforts away from the core of the conflict and away from dealing with these political issues that cause the issue of water. The structure of the process is a long-term staged process. That's rooted in Kissinger back in the 70s and the idea of the long-term stage process was it gave Israel a chance to, by time, secure contact with her neighbors as the process went on. That's the first part. But the process itself, over three decades, has three phases. First, international pressure and violence brings a process to the table. The international community go: “We need the process.”
Second part, Israel concedes limited municipal autonomy for Palestinians in a limited area, far short of the 22 percent of mandate Palestine which they've agreed to live in, with a pledge of final status talks in five years based on a nebulous idea of statehood and what this does is over the five years you get a return to violence because this becomes contentious in Israeli domestic politics and Palestinians don't want to live in this in this state minus. Crucially, this process becomes a holding pen for Palestinian self-determination, funnels all our external intervention into apolitical and economic initiatives and away from the core of the conflict and this has become path dependent. So, when we're even considering a new peace process now, we're back into path dependence, we go into this old pattern which actually can't deal with the core of the conflict and can't deal then with the water issues. And that's really why we are where we are today.
Ms. Hall: Thank you, Ciarán, for giving us that context which is so often missing in the media when we talk about water and fuel in Gaza and in the West Bank, and in many of the contexts that we're working on. I wanted to return and ask a few questions in an upcoming round. For those that are watching, you can submit live questions. There should be a blue button at the top of your screen that is something like “ask live questions.” Please go ahead and use that if you have any questions for our panelists.
Robyn, you were very concise in giving us some of the major, major issues that northeast Syria especially is facing right now, and even potential solutions, which would require a bit of pressure or aid from outside actors right now. If to just drive home this point, as we're looking at an aid landscape that is very deficient not just because of USAID cuts, which were enormous—USAID provided I think something like 40 to 50 percent of all humanitarian aid throughout the Syrian conflict—but also cuts from traditional European donors as well, which are definitely coming. What are your biggest fears? What do you think the consequences of this are in the months and year or years ahead? You've been in northeast Syria for some time, and I just wonder: what keeps you up at night?
Ms. Savage: The answer to that question is a bit twofold. While we're watching this incredible decimation of a humanitarian funding landscape, we're also watching unprecedented historical landmarks occurring in Syria: the fall of Assad, and then as of last night, the SDF-HTS agreement. When I reference Alouk and the factions around Tishrin, those could have political solutions in front of them both in the near future. I would hope that they do. It would be in the best interest of all engaged parties to find a solution to the critical water issues in northeast Syria, and again, going back to not only the resource-rich environment that is NES, not just oil fields, but back to that agricultural element that is and was the breadbasket and vegetable and fruit basket for Syria, that obliges water solutions in northeast Syria to serve the needs of all Syrians.
And now that we're finally talking about one Syria—although it was 16 hours ago, let's give it some time to breathe—we are looking at opportunities we did not see a month ago, we did not see two days ago, we did not see a year ago. So, while generally talking to me recently has been quite a bleak occurrence for many people because of the stark realities we're facing, I do hold hope in opportunities for political solutions to issues that manifest as humanitarian but are political in nature.
That said, I'll be quite frank, the immediate ramifications of the level of devastation to humanitarian funding in northeast Syria are immediate. We don't have months or weeks for these to become issues. We definitely saw, even with just the suspension and the reaction of the humanitarian community to that suspension, immediate consequences to all of those who were internally displaced. Those 100,000 or so that fled during the fall of Assad from Tel Rifaat pocket through Aleppo into northeast Syria, they needed somewhere to go.
We’re already looking at emergency shelter, food, housing, health care—all of these services are not even overstretched, they're disappeared at this point. We've got 216 emergency collective centers with 25,000 people in them that we can't even talk to anymore. So, what's keeping me up at night right now is that while there are long-term opportunities I think that really are substantial in nature in terms of changing the need for this scale of humanitarian funding in Syria, the immediate ramifications of trying to get even a small education project into a camp that's not receiving food, fuel, or water is impossible. It's really going to be a challenge.
Going forward, I do think that it's important we recognize that this reliance on humanitarian mitigation measures—water trucking, hygiene kits, solar panels in the absence of electrification because we've had decimation of critical civilian infrastructure due to warring factions—all of these issues need to now start being also looked not at from only a humanitarian perspective. Yes, that went offline. But if we finally, for the first time in 14 years, have the opportunity to construct, and we have the opportunity to build systems, water systems, reconstruction, meaningful repairs—I've been able to put a window in a school with no roof on it thanks to all of these red lines for over a decade. You can't put a roof on the school, but new windows are fine. We can't work like this. So, I really hope that going forward, we are able to find more practical, long-term, sustainable solutions for the infrastructure behind these ultimately humanitarian needs at the end.
Ms. Hall: Thank you so much, Robyn. I really appreciate it. To reiterate that point, there's apparently a very big difference between reconstruction and rehabilitation in Syria, and there has been for some time, although the line is somewhat confusing at times. But you've outlined the real opportunity lost and the consequences of that for the long-term.
Hassan, speaking of solutions, I wanted to return to you because, as you were writing the Iraq chapter with Maha Yassin, it became quite clear that there were some difficulties in terms of agricultural reform and some of the major reforms that would need to happen in southern Iraq to improve water security at a greater level and improve agriculture, as you mentioned in your opening remarks. But you thought of a few interesting steps that southern Iraq that I wondered if you could discuss a bit, given the political realities on the ground in southern Iraq, especially today.
Amb. Janabi: We can look at the politics in the area, as well as the technical solutions for this, because we need technical solutions to issues that have arisen over the years. But politically speaking, political stability in Iraq is very important to provide services, including water services. Because up to this very moment, we have basic services like electricity, for example, which we have troubles with. Since 2003, up to this very moment, and in the best cases, the national grid electricity only 50 percent of the time and people are relying on private suppliers instead. So, this is a mistake on the part of the water services.
Because of this and because of the transitional nature of the successive governments since 2003, which have been preoccupied with issues of an operational nature rather than long-term solutions to the issues—there is a lot of pressure on the government to provide on every aspect of life in Iraq—water issues have become less of a priority in politics.
But in most of our country, particularly in the south, water insecurity is prevailing compared to previous years. And also in Iraq, up to this moment, the government is relying on providing people with a public distribution system to buy some basic food stuff, so it is not really a good situation. The south in Iraq is the most downstream area of the most downstream country in the Tigris-Euphrates basin. So, geographically, it's not in a good position. But, for example, on the other hand, Basra, is the main oil producer in the country. So, financially, the city and its surroundings should be able to cater for the expenses to provide water services. I also saw opportunities where finances were available, but the inability of the local authorities to implement solutions was the main reason for failing to provide, at least, safe drinking water.
In post-2003 Iraq, we have changed our political system from a highly centralized political system where everything is decided in the capital into a decentralized system where water utilities are looked after by local authorities. But those local authorities and local capacities are not that good to provide for issues like desalination, because I think the best option for southern Iraq is to go through the desalination route. They have the resources, they have, the oil, the energy, and there is a sustainable water resource, which is the sea.
They have otherwise traditionally relied on the water flowing from the Tigris and Euphrates, which been declining. More than 60 percent of the water is gone. And the Tigris and Euphrates, these are mighty, mighty rivers, very, very big rivers. It used to, on average, bring to Basra something like 500 to 600 cubic meters per second. Right now, we are lucky if 50 cubic meters per second reaches the Shatt al-Arab, so it's a huge difference. And then when you put 50 cubic meters per second into a mighty river like the Tigris or the Euphrates, you don't even see it. It just becomes invisible. There is no water flowing.
It is a very sad story there, but they started with desalination. I think the biggest desalination plant in Iraq has been started by the Basra local government, but they have awarded it to a Chinese company and chose a location that did not make sense to me—that's really very, very far, nearly 200 kilometers south of Basra—so there's an extra $1.5 billion towards the cost of that. And then, the issue between Iraq and Iran, and the Gaza issue, and now the sanctions by the U.S. government that impacted also the power sector in Iraq. But there is one thing that's good and related to politics: the current government of Iraq is being supported by Iran. So, when they took over the government, the Iranians released water from the Karun River to Shatt al-Arab, which over the past decade or so, used to be diverted away from Shatt al-Arab, which also enhanced saltwater intrusion into Shatt al-Arab. So now, there is a political gesture that some of this freshwater is coming, so people have been pacified.
But if you remember, for example, in 2018, there were also a very, very widespread protests in Basra, related to contamination incidents in the water. So, it is a very volatile situation, socially and politically. And so, we have to continue, for example, to try to solve this because this is a good gesture from the Iranian side. So, we need to make this sustainable and permanent rather than a political gesture. We need to resort to the international law and provide for this. This water from Karun and Karkheh River used to come to Basra region at 100 percent, then all of a sudden it was cut by major dams into zero flow from those countries. This has consequences.
We have the technological solutions, like desalination that we need. We need to intensify dialogue with the Iranians and Turkey. We have less problems with Syria regarding the Euphrates. And there's also a good indication in terms of Iraq-Turkish relations, where recently President Erdogan visited Iraq and signed with the prime minister a 10-year agreement of water cooperation. So I am, of course, supportive of that. Everybody's supportive, but it was a technical project, technical cooperation, rather than a strategic water-sharing agreement that we aspire to, but still, it brings the two sides together.
They also have workable mechanisms to fund the common projects that they agreed on, using oil as well. There's also a reference that's very politically important in that agreement, a reference made to the 1946 Iraq-Turkey Agreement that was one of the best agreements between the two countries in terms of managing the transboundary water. There's a mention to that, which indicates some sort of openness in discussing the issues.
Agriculture needs to be also re-evaluated, including new technologies, such as drip irrigation systems, sprinkler irrigation, pressurized systems. We need to implement this very, very fast, but the rural areas are poor and farmers cannot afford to buy these expensive systems. There's in place some sort of financial support from the government, but there's also some measurements where the government encourages people to use these new irrigation systems so that government-owned silos would buy from those farms that have been using new technologies with a higher price in the market, just so they can depart from the traditional way of irrigating water which is like 60 to 70 percent waste of water indoors.
So, there is something that's happening there, but it is not that easy. Agriculture is a long-term investment. It is not just one project, where you go, you do it, design it, you go and finish it. Agriculture is a recurrence of things, and it needs to move in the right direction, and it needs to be profitable. Up to this very moment, agriculture practices are not profitable in Iraq, and it probably would fail completely without government assistance. This is a failure and needs to be really looked into very, very carefully.
Ms. Hall: Thank you. Thank you so much. In the report itself, Ambassador Hassan talks about a specific project that would improve drinking water and provide revenues for drinking water in Basra in particular to help mitigate some of the issues that we saw in 2018, when about 120,000 people ended up in the hospital with waterborne diseases. I think that's a really good segue to you, Neda. We're running a little bit out of time, but you mentioned positive steps that have happened in Jordan. I wondered if we could conclude with things that you think need to move forward. What are the concerns you have with some of the projects that are being talked about, but are necessary for Jordan moving forward?
Dr. Zawahri: First of all, the Jordanians know what needs to happen but it's going to take political will of the monarchy working with the government. We can plug all the holes: for example, we can continue to lower non-revenue water, which USAID has helped tremendously in, stopping the loss in the system in terms of the stolen water in Jordan due to the preciousness of water. There is theft of water and it's resold in the system, so that needs to be reined in.
We also need to increase the efficiency, for example, in the agriculture sector and in the municipal sector of using water. One way to do this—and it builds also on what's going on in Iraq—is to simply distribute free water conservation technology and equipment to people, to farmers, to households, but also provide maintenance to create the incentive structure for using this new technology in the long term.
What happens is, in all nations, we have political elites that can sidestep the laws and expand their use of precious natural resources. And they use their power to shelter this consumption. Jordan is not immune to this; it does happen in Jordan. The Ministry of Water has tried to address this under Hafez al-Nasser, and it reached a certain point where they became too close to the powerful. What prevented them from going all the way and addressing this issue was authority and connection. So, if the monarch were to give his blessing to the officials to continue with reigning in overconsumption, that would be extremely helpful. All these changes in behavior, in policy, in consumption will not be enough, clearly, due to the impacts of climate change, overconsumption, and increasing demands, and the absolute shortage of water.
What other nations have done—and we heard also about Ireland and other nations—is to simply build the infrastructure to augment supply. Jordan has tried to do that transboundary way by using a multilateral approach, and so far, it hasn't really paid off., I argue in the chapter that we should continue with the multilateral effort once there's peace in the region. But in the meantime, it's really critical as any nation in the world does this—Israel built five desalination plants along the Mediterranean Sea—there's no reason why Jordan should not proceed with building its own desalination plant on the Red Sea and transfer this water up to the North where its population is concentrated. This is the national water carrier.
And recently in the news, Jordan signed off on the project, which is $5 billion dollars and a massive project for Jordan to undertake. The question is whether it's going to be able to fund that, whether all the aid cuts and the loan cuts, the loan guarantees, how that's going to play in, we're not quite sure. Even if Jordan succeeds— and one hopes it does, because every nation should have enough natural resources for its people, water being one and electricity being another—once Jordan succeeds with this, it's still going to need more water. This is one project of additional projects to come in the future.
Ms. Hall: Thank you so much, Neda. We're actually at time, but for those of us that can stay for the next few minutes, I want to give Ciarán the final word. It's hard to even know what to ask you right now, since we're apparently talking about ethnic cleansing from Gaza at the moment as a real solution. The Arab states are coming together to try to form a counter plan to this President Trump plan. What would that need to look like? For Palestinians in Gaza, and if you have time, the West Bank.
Mr. Ó Cuinn: Just on water or more broadly, you can’t differentiate between them. I mean, look, we need a new start. We need a wholly new start. What we're trying to do in MEDRC, as the only organization that survived for the peace process—the only reason we survived is we consciously left the peace process, left the path dependency of the peace process and adopted an approach of absolute parity of esteem, absolute equality.
So rather than a process that says: “If the Palestinians are good and behave themselves, sometime in 10 or 15 years, they will have equality and statehood,” our doctrine is parity, then peace. Parity today, right now, strategically, operationally, and tactically, means you treat the Palestinians and the Israelis as absolute and utter equals in everything you do, and that's the approach we should have.
For Gaza and the plan, the most important thing I would say is that there are about 50 human beings who work in the Palestinian Water Authority from Gaza. They are scattered to the four corners of the world. Some of them are still in Gaza, God help them. Some of them are in Egypt, some of them are in the West Bank, some of them are in other parts of the world.
They know where the pipes are, they know how to fix the system, they know how to do everything. For 10, 15, 20 years they've developed these centralized strategic plans for water and gas. They're heroes. They are some of the best trained people in the region. They're as good as anyone in Israel, they're as good as anyone in any of the Arab countries around. They're really, really good. The most important thing any aid agency or anyone wanting to do this is get those people, get them in a room, get them some money, some laptops, some capacity, and get them working on that and that's the whole thing.
There's one thing that's been missing in the treatment of Palestine for 40 years is we seem to treat it as some type of 19th century Congress of Berlin approach rather than a modern approach based on parity of esteem, the way we would run any peace process. To the international community, to the Arab states and the non-Arab states, to the Europeans, to the Israelis, you have to have Palestinian women and men at the center of this, not as onlookers. You cannot build positive peace by ignoring the human beings you're trying to devise the peace for.
Whether it's reconstructing Gaza, whether it's reconstructing a single pipeline, whether it's a new nation, whatever you want to call it, you have to engage and put the human beings at the center of it. This has been run shamefully for 40 years by Europeans, Americans, Arab countries like some 19th century Congress of Berlin type thing. It's time to put in not 21st century, but late 20th century approaches, that says we must have a positive peace based on every human being between the Jordan River and the sea enjoying the same degrees of prosperity and national self-determination.
Ms. Hall: Thank you so much Ciarán. That’s a good note to end on and a reminder that works for all of the contexts that we've spoken about. We didn't even talk about Yemen. Dr. Mohammad Al-Saidi writes about the challenges in Yemen which have only obviously increased in the past couple of years, but we moved forward ahead with that chapter anyway because the reality is that these challenges aren't going away. Water insecurity is entwined with them, as Ciarán mentioned, often the canary in the coal mine. But I wanted to thank everyone for joining us and for our speakers and for our other authors that couldn't be here, Lyse Mauvais, Maha Yassin and Dr. Mohammad Al-Saidi. We really appreciate your work and I encourage everybody to go online and check out the report. It's quite in-depth, but there's also commentaries and one-pagers as well for the busy people out there. Thank you again and have a wonderful day.