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Water, Politics and Dams in the Mesopotamia Basin of the Northern Middle East: How Turkey Instrumentalises the South-Eastern Anatolia Project for Political, Military and Strategic Interests

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Tigris and Euphrates Rivers: Their Environment from Headwaters to Mouth

Part of the book series: Aquatic Ecology Series ((AQEC,volume 11))

Abstract

Iran, Iraq and Turkey, and to a lesser extent Syria, are often said to be the water-rich exceptions in a broad, water-deficient northern Africa and Middle East region (Siddiqi and Anadon 2011: 13). Yet, groundwater levels and water availability are falling in the wider Middle East region generally, and the future prospects are dim. According to NASA, the Levant region, comprising Cyprus, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Turkey, is experiencing its worst drought for nine centuries. Moreover, groundwater levels are decreasing as a result of a higher rate of extraction than recharging, while the quality of the water is at also risk due to environmental pollution (Tropp 2006). The river from which Jordan took its country name is beginning to run dry (Zurayk 2014). Iran, Iraq and Turkey, as well as Syria, are also experiencing increasing periods of drought and serious water crises (Kömüşcü et al. 2005; Barnes 2009; Douglas et al. 2010; Al-Ansari 2013; Gleick 2014; Lund 2014; Madani 2014). An increased intensity of drought is also reported in these countries (Kelleya et al. 2015; Ahmadi 2018;).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasa-finds-drought-in-eastern-mediterranean-worst-of-past-900-years (All webpage citations accessed May 22, 2018.)

  2. 2.

    ‘[T]he World Bank pioneered the modelling of river basins and new methods of economic analysis of multipurpose projects in developing countries’ (World Bank 2012).

  3. 3.

    See: http://www.gap.gov.tr/en/latest-state-in-gap-page-47.html, date of access 17-2-2021.

  4. 4.

    The Kurdish names of these provinces are in the same row: Semsûr, Elîh, Amed, Dîlok, Kîlîs, Sêrt, Rîha, Mêrdîn and Şirnex, respectively.

  5. 5.

    See the figures provided by the Turkish Statistical Institute (Türkiye İstatistikler Kurum, TÜİK), no. 24580, September 25, 2017; at www.tuik.gov.tr/PdfGetir.do?id=24580

  6. 6.

    At www.mezopotamyaekoloji.org

  7. 7.

    Turkish place names given in Kurdish in parentheses.

  8. 8.

    Response to Şırnak parliamentary deputy Hasip Kaplan’s parliamentary question BDP 7/5848 (June 1, 2012); at www2.tbmm.gov.tr/d24/7/7-5848sgc.pdf

  9. 9.

    The DSİ puts the IDP number at 15,000 and the number of people who will be affected at 55,000, while a study by a former World Bank expert includes 23,000 covers people displaced in the 1990s, thus estimating the number of affected people to be 78,000 (Eberlein et al. 2010: 296); however, this does not include some 3000 nomadic families that use the Tigris River there for their animals and thus makes a total in the vicinity of 100,000 affected people.

  10. 10.

    Notably, there is only one dam, at Birecik, in the eastern part of the region (between Şanlıurfa and Gaziantep), for which a ‘resettlement and rehabilitation project has been planned and implemented in order to minimise the effects of displacement on the affected communities’ (with mixed results), as Çiğdem Kurt (2013, i) notes in her doctoral thesis; as she also notes, Birecik is mainly Turkish-speaking, i.e. not Kurdish.

  11. 11.

    According to a consultant on resettlement for the World Bank, speaking to the author Ercan Ayboğa in a meeting in 2006, in Batman. See also: https://www.rivernet.org/turquie/ilisu.htm, date of access February 12, 2021

  12. 12.

    See gap.gov.tr/en/internationally-funded-projects-page-15.html

  13. 13.

    At legal.un.org/ilc/texts/instruments/english/conventions/8_3_1997.pdf

  14. 14.

    reuters.com/article/us-iraq-water/iraq-parliament-demands-more-water-from-neighbors-idUSTRE54B3ZA20090512

  15. 15.

    theregion.org/article/13413-the-euphrates-turkey-039-s-tool-of-destabilisation-of-rojava

  16. 16.

    E.g. anfenglish.com/rojava/the-turkish-state-uses-the-water-of-euphrates-as-a-threat-26014

  17. 17.

    Turkey guaranteed to Syria a minimum, year-long flow of 500 m3/sec from the Euphrates in 1987, through an informal protocol agreed when the construction of the Atatürk Dam was ongoing; the average flow over the year before construction of the large dams and precipitation decrease had been around 800 m3/sec. Prior to the war in Syria, Turkey had violated this agreement few times, but only in a limited way (except for one-month cut linked to filling the Atatürk Dam Reservoir). See fao.org/nr/water/aquastat/countries_regions/Profile_segments/SYR-IntIss_eng.stm

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Rural Sociology, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands

    Joost Jongerden

  2. Department of Geography, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Barcelona, Spain

    Zeynep Sıla Akıncı

  3. Keep Hasankeyf Alive, Batman, Turkey

    Ercan Ayboğa

Authors
  1. Joost Jongerden
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  2. Zeynep Sıla Akıncı
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  3. Ercan Ayboğa
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Correspondence to Joost Jongerden .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Environmental and Animal Sciences, Unitec Institute of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand

    Laith A. Jawad

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Jongerden, J., Akıncı, Z.S., Ayboğa, E. (2021). Water, Politics and Dams in the Mesopotamia Basin of the Northern Middle East: How Turkey Instrumentalises the South-Eastern Anatolia Project for Political, Military and Strategic Interests. In: Jawad, L.A. (eds) Tigris and Euphrates Rivers: Their Environment from Headwaters to Mouth. Aquatic Ecology Series, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57570-0_16

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