A C-130 Hercules aircraft from the Republic of Korea Air Force sits on the flight line at Rosecrans Air National Guard Base, St. Joseph, Missouri, May 12, 2022. C-130s from the ROKAF, Little Rock Air Force Base, and Dyess AFB were attending the Advanced Airlift Tactics Training Center’s Advanced Tactics Aircrew Course / credit: Michael Crane / U.S. Air National Guard
Editor’s Note: This analysis originally appeared in People’s Dispatch.
Between August 22 and September 1, the United States and South Korea concluded their largest joint military drills in the Korean Peninsula since 2017, under the name ‘Ulchi Freedom Shield’. Over the last four years, the scope of the annual exercises had been scaled back, first because of U.S. President Donald Trump’s attempts at diplomacy with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and later because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
With these drills, however, the United States and South Korea seem to be attempting to send a clear message to both North Korea and China of their united military posture in the region, and come at a time when the U.S. encirclement of China continues rapidly.
The military relationship between the United States and South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), has a long history, stretching back at least as far as the Korean War. The United States has maintained a force of at least tens of thousands of troops in South Korea since prior to the Korean War, and, while South Korean forces are otherwise independent, at times of war they are subordinated to the command of a U.S. general as part of the ROK/U.S. Combined Forces Command. About 28,500 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea, making it the country with the third-highest number of U.S. troops outside of the United States.
While the recent exercises have been conducted against a nameless enemy, it is not hard to see towards whom their message is aimed. The site of the exercises is only 32 kilometers from the border and De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea. Live-fire tank and troop maneuvers have been practiced as the United States and the ROK engage in simulations and seek to increase interoperability of their deployments and technologies. War-gamed attempts to seize “weapons of mass destruction” and mount a defense of Seoul suggest that they are preparations for potential conflict with North Korea.
Trump’s attempts to seek a diplomatic end to the North Korean nuclear program were unsuccessful, as have been U.S. economic sanctions and blockades. These exercises must be seen as a continuing show of force towards the same chief end. As part of his campaign and even more recently, new South Korean Premier Yoon Suk-yeol has touted his willingness to engage in “decapitation strikes” against the North Korean leadership, as part of a broader turn towards support for, and from, U.S. interests in the region.
He has also more recently offered a bouquet of economic enticements for North Korea to abandon its nuclear program, an offer that was rejected out of hand by Kim Jong-un’s sister, Kim Yo-jong, who pointed out that it was merely the restatement of a similar offer that had been made and dismissed in the past. The North sees its nuclear arsenal as non-negotiable and the key to its global legitimacy, and is no doubt also aware of what has happened to other countries, such as Libya and Iran, that have agreed to put holds on their military nuclear capabilities at the behest of the United States. With U.S. bases and troops having been positioned so close to its border for almost its entire existence as a country, it is easy to understand why North Korea does not see a reduction in its military capabilities as a particularly pressing or, indeed, sensible priority.
The resumption of these joint military exercises has also been viewed with alarm by China, which, like North Korea, has repeatedly pointed to U.S. attempts to set up a NATO-like organization in Asia. As tensions in the region reached unprecedented levels recently following U.S. politician Nancy Pelosi’s provocative visit to Taiwan, it seems the U.S. military presence in the region is only likely to increase in the near future.
South Korea and the United States also recently participated in trilateral military exercises with Japan near Hawai’i, signaling what might be a new low in hostilities that trace their roots to the Japanese occupation of Korea, which only ended in 1945, when the administration of South Korea was handed over briefly to the United States. This too has been noted with concern by China, and suggests that the United States is coordinating its allies in the region as it attempts to extend its global hegemony ever-further eastward.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi walking towards the dais to address the nation at Red Fort in Delhi, on the occasion of 75th Independence Day on August 15, 2021 / Indian Prime Minister’s Office
Editor’s Note: The following analysis was produced in partnership by Newsclick and Globetrotter.
The recent Quad leaders meeting in the White House on September 24 appears to have shifted focus away from its original framing as a security dialogue between four countries, the United States, India, Japan and Australia. Instead, the United States seems to be moving much closer to Australia as a strategic partner and providing it with nuclear submarines.
Supplying Australia with U.S. nuclear submarines that use bomb-grade uranium can violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) protocols. Considering that the United States wants Iran not to enrich uranium beyond 3.67 percent, this is blowing a big hole in its so-called rule-based international order—unless we all agree that the rule-based international order is essentially the United States and its allies making up all the rules.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had initiated the idea of the Quad in 2007 as a security dialogue. In the statement issued after the first formal meeting of the Quad countries dated March 12, 2021, “security” was used in the sense of strategic security. Before the recent meeting of the Quad, both the United States and the Indian sides denied that it was a military alliance, even though the Quad countries conduct joint naval exercises—the Malabar exercises—and have signed various military agreements. The September 24 Quad joint statement focuses more on other “security” issues: health security, supply chain and cybersecurity.
Has India decided that it still needs to retain strategic autonomy even if it has serious differences with China on its northern borders and therefore stepped away from the Quad as an Asian NATO? Or has the United States itself downgraded the Quad now that Australia has joined its geostrategic game of containing China?
Naval ships from India, Australia, Japan, Singapore, and the United States steam in formation in the Bay of Bengal on September 5, 2007, during Exercise Malabar 07-2. The formation included USS Kitty Hawk, USS Nimitz, INS Viraat, JS Yuudachi, JS Ohnami, RSS Formidable, HMAS Adelaide, INS Ranvijay, INS Brahmaputra, INS Ranjit, USS Chicago and USS Higgins / credit: U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Stephen W. Rowe
Before the Quad meeting in Washington, the United States and the UK signed an agreement with Australia to supply eight nuclear submarines—the AUKUS agreement. Earlier, the United States had transferred nuclear submarine technology to the UK, and it may have some subcontracting role here. Nuclear submarines, unlike diesel-powered submarines, are not meant for defensive purposes. They are for force projection far away from home. Their ability to travel large distances and remain submerged for long periods makes them effective strike weapons against other countries.
The AUKUS agreement means that Australia is canceling its earlier French contract to supply 12 diesel-powered submarines. The French are livid that they, one of NATO’s lynchpins, have been treated this way with no consultation by the United States or Australia on the cancellation. The U.S. administration has followed it up with “discreet disclosures” to the media and U.S. think tanks that the agreement to supply nuclear submarines also includes Australia providing naval and air bases to the United States. In other words, Australia is joining the United States and the UK in a military alliance in the “Indo-Pacific.”
Earlier, President Macron had been fully on board with the U.S. policy of containing China and participated in Freedom of Navigation exercises in the South China Sea. France had even offered its Pacific Island colonies—and yes, France still has colonies—and its navy for the U.S. project of containing China in the Indo-Pacific. France has two sets of island chains in the Pacific Ocean that the United Nations terms as non-self-governing territories—read colonies—giving France a vast exclusive economic zone, larger even than that of the United States. The United States considers these islands less strategically valuable than Australia, which explains its willingness to face France’s anger. In the U.S. worldview, NATO and the Quad are both being downgraded for a new military strategy of a naval thrust against China.
Australia has very little manufacturing capacity. If the eight nuclear submarines are to be manufactured partially in Australia, the infrastructure required for manufacturing nuclear submarines and producing/handling of highly enriched uranium that the U.S. submarines use will probably require a minimum time of 20 years. That is the reason behind the talk of U.S. naval and air bases in Australia, with the United States providing the nuclear submarines and fighter-bomber aircraft either on lease, or simply locating them in Australia.
I have previously argued that the term Indo-Pacific may make sense to the United States, the UK or even Australia, which are essentially maritime nations. The optics of three maritime powers, two of which are settler-colonial, while the other, the erstwhile largest colonial power, talking about a rule-based international order do not appeal to most of the world. Oceans are important to maritime powers, who have used naval dominance to create colonies. This was the basis of the dominance of British, French and later U.S. imperial powers. That is why they all have large aircraft carriers: they are naval powers who believe that the gunboat diplomacy through which they built their empires still works. The United States has 700-800 military bases spread worldwide; Russia has about 10; and China has only one base in Djibouti, Africa.
Behind the rhetoric about the Indo-Pacific and open seas is the U.S. play in Southeast Asia. Here, the talk of the Indo-Pacific has little resonance for most people. Its main interest is in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which was spearheaded by the ASEAN countries. Even with the United States and India walking out of the RCEP negotiations, the 15-member trading bloc is the largest trading bloc in the world, with nearly 30 percent of the world’s GDP and population. Two of the Quad partners—Japan and Australia—are in the RCEP.
The U.S. strategic vision is to project its maritime power against China and contest for control over even Chinese waters and economic zones. This is the 2018 U.S. Pacific strategy doctrine that it has itself put forward, which it de-classified recently. The doctrine states that the U.S. naval strategy is to deny China sustained air and sea dominance even inside the first island chain and dominate all domains outside the first island chain. For those interested in how the U.S. views the Quad and India’s role in it, this document is a good education.
The United States wants to use the disputes that Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia have with China over the boundaries of their respective exclusive economic zones. While some of them may look to the United States for support against China, none of these Southeast Asian countries supports the U.S. interpretation of the Freedom of Navigation, under which it carries out its Freedom of Navigation Operations, or FONOPS. As India found to its cost in Lakshadweep, the U.S. definition of the freedom of navigation does not square with India’s either. For all its talk about rule-based world order, the United States has not signed the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) either. So when India and other partners of the United States sign on to Freedom of Navigation statements of the United States, they are signing on to the U.S. understanding of the freedom of navigation, which is at variance with theirs.
The 1973 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty created two classes of countries, ones who would be allowed to a set of technologies that could lead to bomb-grade uranium or plutonium, and others who would be denied these technologies. There was, however, a submarine loophole in the NPT and its complementary IAEA Safeguards for the peaceful use of atomic energy. Under the NPT, non-nuclear-weapon-state parties must place all nuclear materials under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards, except nuclear materials for nonexplosive military purposes. No country until now has utilized this submarine loophole to withdraw weapon-grade uranium from safeguards. If this exception is utilized by Australia, how will the United States continue to argue against Iran’s right to enrich uranium, say for nuclear submarines, which is within its right to develop under the NPT?
India was never a signatory to the NPT, and therefore is a different case than that of Australia. If Australia, a signatory, is allowed to use the submarine loophole, what prevents other countries from doing so as well?
Australia did not have to travel this route if it wanted nuclear submarines. The French submarines that they were buying were originally nuclear submarines but using low-enriched uranium. It is retrofitting diesel engines that has created delays in their supplies to Australia. It appears that under the current Australian leadership of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Australia wants to flex its muscles in the neighborhood, therefore tying up with Big Brother, the United States.
For the United States, if Southeast Asia is the terrain of struggle against China, Australia is a very useful springboard. It also substantiates what has been apparent for some time now—that the Indo-Pacific is only cover for a geostrategic competition between the United States and China over Southeast Asia. And unfortunately for the United States, East Asia and Southeast Asia have reciprocal economic interests that bring them closer to each other. And Australia, with its brutal settler-colonial past of genocide and neocolonial interventions in Southeast Asia, is not seen as a natural partner by countries there.
India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems to have lost the plot completely. Does it want strategic autonomy, as was its policy post-independence? Or does it want to tie itself to a waning imperial power, the United States? The first gave it respect well beyond its economic or military clout. The current path seems more and more a path toward losing its stature as an independent player.
Prabir Purkayastha is the founding editor of Newsclick.in, a digital media platform. He is an activist for science and the free software movement.
Afro-Colombians from northern Cauca during the May 2021 national strike (Twitter/Renacientes)
Mobilizations took to the streets of Colombia on April 28 in a national strike to protest social injustice and aggressive tax reforms proposed by the Iván Duque government. Student movements, trade unions, young peoples’ organizations, feminist groups, and indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples’ movements marched, blocked roads and held cultural activities in urban centers and rural territories throughout the country, exercising their right to peaceful protest. But the state wasted no time in responding with violent repression, especially in major cities such as Calí, Bogotá, Palmira and Popayán.
Although the vast majority of protests have been peaceful, isolated incidents of looting and violence have been used as an excuse for using excessive force against protesters. Media discourses around “good protesters” and “bad protesters” legitimize this response. Widespread reports of infiltrators are being used to provoke violence and looting, as has been the case in previous strikes in the country. Armed forces reportedly have stood by and allowed looting to take place, only to later respond to such incidents with violent repression.
Rather than heeding the demands of the citizens against the tax reform and social injustice, the state has responded with militarization, turning peaceful demonstrations into scenes of war. Helicopters circle above protest points and communities, while tanks thunder through narrow city streets.
Several cities are occupied by four armed state actors:
armed police,
Escuadrón Móvil Antidisturbios (ESMAD, or Mobile Anti-Riot Squads of the National Police),
military forces and
Grupo Operativo Especial de Seguridad del Cuerpo Nacional de Policía (GOES, or Special Security Task Force of the National Police Force).
Instead of seeking to pacify the situation and protect citizens, these forces have increasingly threatened security, peace and human rights.
Flagrant Human Rights Abuses
Countless videos recorded by protesters and onlookers circulate daily on social media, showing cases of police brutality, indiscriminate shootings, and the use of tear gas inside barrios that contain children and elderly people. Over the past few days, the violence has taken on a new face in Calí, with the presence of plainclothes police officers and reports of unmarked cars carrying out drive-by shootings against protesters.
Bogotá-based non-governmental organization Indepaz reports the following occurred between April 28 and May 8:
47 murders (the majority of whom have been young adults and 4 of whom were minors),
12 cases of sexual violence,
28 eye injuries,
1,876 acts of violence,
963 arbitrary detentions and
548 forced disappearances.
Reports are circulating of people being arrested and denied information of their destination, violating their rights to due process and exposing them to the risk of arbitrary detention, cruel and inhumane treatment, and forced disappearance.
Armed police have threatened lawyers and human-rights defenders when inquiring about missing people at police stations. The international community woke up to the seriousness of the situation when, on May 3, members of a humanitarian mission including UN and state representatives were attacked by armed police while waiting to enter a police station in search of missing people. On April 7, as a humanitarian mission was taking place north of Calí with the presence of Senator Alexander Lopez, a drive-by shooting took place, injuring one person and killing three.
The Racialization of State Repression
The violence and repression has a disproportionate impact on Black communities, only mirroring Colombia’s ongoing internal armed conflict. For example, 35 of the 47 murders Indepaz reported took place in Calí, home to South America’s second-largest Afro-descendant population. No surprise that structural and systemic racism are deeply ingrained in Calí. Many of the most aggressive cases of state violence have been carried out in neighborhoods with majority or significant Afro-descendant populations, treating communities as enemies of war. Historically, these barrios have suffered socio-economic exclusion, further entrenched by the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, structural racism and state violence. Many barrio residents already were victims of forced displacement, having fled the armed conflict in the majority Afro-descendant regions of the northern Cauca Department, in which Calí is located, and the Pacific coast.
While official statistics do not reveal the proportion of Black victims in this current wave of police brutality due to a lack of disaggregated data, photos of victims clearly show the disproportionate impact on young Afro-descendant men.
Racial profiling not only underpins state violence, but is central in the denial of state responsibility and impunity. Already, discussions around existing gang violence and urban conflicts are being used to question whether many of these young men participated in the protests or were delinquents killed in the context of the everyday violence in their communities. This discourse no doubt seeks to reduce the numbers of protest-related deaths, simultaneously justifying the deaths of young Black men. The first death registered in Calí took place in the majority Black barrio, Marroquin II, where a 22-year-old man was killed. But the military later denied his death was related to the protests.
Militarization, Imperialism and the Protests
The current situation in Colombia cannot be understood in isolation from the wider armed conflict and the ever-deepening neoliberal agenda supported and sustained by the United States and multinationals that feed off Colombia’s natural resources. U.S. imperialist interests in the region have been clear since the late 19th century, with the attempted invasion of Colombia’s neighbor, Panama, in 1885 and the start of the Panama Canal project in 1904. In 1948, the Organization of American States was created during a meeting in Colombia.
Colombia has been the strategic point for Washington’s political, economic and military operations in recent decades. Thanks to U.S. technical and logistical support, Colombia is now one of the greatest military powers in the region. With the 1999 signing of Plan Colombia and the 2002 Patriot Plan, U.S. military presence and influence has only deepened.
Further, U.S. military support has always depended on state policies that benefited U.S. imperial interests. For example, in 2009 the United States signed an agreement with the Uribe Government to be able to operate from seven Colombian military bases. Although this agreement was blocked by the Constitutional Court, the Santos government later arrived at alternative bilateral agreements. These enabled access and use of the bases in practice, and further facilitated the fruitless and dangerous strategy of spraying the herbicide, glyphosate, on illicit crops. All of this sustains the ideology of the “internal enemy” and the terrorist threat that underpinned the original emergence and expansion of paramilitarism in the 1980s.
It is precisely this paramilitarism model the Colombian state is using in the context of the current protests, particularly in Calí, where state agents, often without proper identification, collaborate with civilians to shoot and kill protesters from high-end cars. The Indigenous Guard, accompanying the protests in Calí, have suffered several attacks of this kind, most recently on May 9, when eight people were wounded.
This violent state repression is yet another consequence of imperialist intervention and the extractivist neoliberal project that uses militarism to eliminate a historically racialized population it considers residual as well as a threat to the capitalist, white-supremacist order.
Esther Ojulari is a human-rights and racial-justice activist and sociologist. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of London, writing on transitional justice and reparations for the Afro-descendant people in Colombia. She worked for eight years as a consultant in the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on Afro-descendant rights. Esther is currently Regional Coordinator in Buenaventura, Calí and Northern Cauca for the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES). She is a member of several Afro-descendant and African-led international networks and coalitions.
Harrinson Cuero Campaz is a Afro-Colombian rights activist. He is a Ph.D. candidate writing on sustainability in urban and regional planning for biologically and culturally diverse territories. He is a social activist and member of the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN, or Black Communities Process). Harrinson currently works as regional representative of Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES) and as a coordinator for the formulation of the Special Territorial Plan of the District of Buenaventura 2021-40.
Latif Karim Ismael, 75, in his once-vibrant agricultural field in Chaqlawa in Iraqi Kurdistan / credit: Alessandra Bajec
SULAYMANIYAH, Iraqi Kurdistan—Standing outside his home in Chaqlawa village, a half-hour drive from the city of Sulaymaniyah, Latif Karim Ismael, wearing black baggy trousers and a light-blue shirt, greeted us and hinted we sit in his backyard.
Accustomed to working a thriving land, the 75-year-old farm worker has to face up to a completely different reality today, with his production having dramatically dropped because of a drought.
“Ten years ago, our land produced 12 tons of wheat—now it’s six,” Karim Ismael began recounting to Toward Freedom. “Barley is half or less than what we used to harvest. Until five years ago, I was growing plenty of vegetables, like chickpeas, beans, lentils. Now, it’s just wheat and barley.”
Karim Ismael added that, besides low rainfall, the poor state of water has caused heavy losses to his yield. Untreated wastewater originating from Sulaymaniyah, the capital of the province of Sulaymaniyah in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region (KRI), has contaminated water and soil around Tanjaro River since the early 2000s.
“Back in time, I used to sell my own produce and make an income from that,” the 75-year-old sighed. “Today, the little we grow barely covers our needs.”
Living with three family members, none of whom work, he has relied on his small pension from working for 16 years as a handyman in a public school to provide for the household.
The main source of water supply for his family is groundwater from a well, collected for both agriculture and domestic use (drinking, washing, cooking and cleaning). Having witnessed harsh water shortages in the past few years, he said he would turn to the water well for irrigating his crops.
Map of the Sulaymaniyah Governorate highlighted in red. The Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) is highlighted in red and beige / credit: TUBS / Wikipedia
The agricultural season in KRI usually starts in early November with the first rainfall. The harvest begins in mid-May and lasts until June, extending into July in some areas.
Most Kurdish farmers have normally relied on winter rains to fill reservoirs that sustain their fields through the dry season. However, rainfall across the region has drastically dropped over the last two years.
In April, the director of Dukan dam predicted a drought in the region this year as only 300 millimeters—half of the needed precipitation—had fallen.
Fifty percent of Iraq’s farmland faces desertification. The main rivers—the Euphrates and Tigris—are expected to dry up by 2040, according to the Iraqi federal government. Meanwhile, the World Bank has predicted a 20-percent drop in drinking water by 2050. NGOs say long-standing dams in neighboring countries exacerbate the conditions. Meanwhile, the regional government recently approved four dams in Iraqi Kurdistan to combat the lack of water. All this comes as Iraq is among the five countries most vulnerable to water and food insecurity due to climate change.
Since the start of the 2000s, local farmers have not received compensation or other types of support from the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) for losses suffered.
“We haven’t seen any assistance, whether financial aid, equipment or fertilizers,” Karim Ismael said. He added the KRG said its priority was first the fight against ISIS, then the budget dispute with the Iraqi federal government, and later the COVID pandemic.
The old peasant lives on his invalidity pension, having carried a war injury disability since the time he fought during the 1960s for autonomy within Iraq. Like everyone in the village, he depends on groundwater for his family’s consumption and to water the little he can produce. They have their own well and share it with four households.
Chaqlawa, which counts 50 houses and some 330 residents, is not connected to the main water pipeline from Sulaymaniyah, as is usually the case in rural areas. People help one another by sharing water wells. They strive to ensure wells do not dry up, or at least that the groundwater is sustained until the next rainy season.
Adding pressure on water resource management, villagers have not adapted to the water crisis.
“People don’t use water properly,” Shad Azad Rahim, an environmental activist from Sulaymaniyah told Toward Freedom. “There’s still no awareness of water conservation, and many farmers have not converted to modern, efficient irrigation systems.” Only two farmers use the drip irrigation method.
Rahim, who coordinates projects at Humat Dijlah and Waterkeepers Iraq-Kurdistan, two local organizations striving to protect water sources, denounced that shopkeepers and others use drinking water for routine cleaning. “Such conduct goes completely unpunished.”
The project coordinator also pointed to the lack of wastewater treatment plants in Iraq, implying sewage and industrial garbage are commonly dumped into fresh water courses. That has polluted the KRI’s two main sources for drinking water, the Dukan and Darbandikhan lakes.
“People have been demanding treatment facilities for years and years,” he said. “Yet, no action has been seen from the government’s side.”
A map highlighting Iraq’s Kurdistan region and the Euphrates and Tigris rivers / credit: researchgate.net
‘Tar Oil Killed My Crops’
A few hundred meters away from Karim Ismael’s house, three villagers who had gathered on a rural road made their way into a patio while inviting this reporter to follow them.
“Years back, I was planting a large amount of crops. Until the day I found them all black and dead!” Mohamed Mahmoud Ismael uttered to Toward Freedom. Donning a black-and-white turban scarf on his head, the 75-year-old pointed to an oil factory in the vicinity of farmlands. “Tar oil poured straight into Tanjaro River at night reached my arable land and killed the crops.”
Seventy percent of Iraq’s industrial waste is dumped into rivers or the sea, based on data provided by the UN and academics. The Tanjaro River, located south of Sulaymaniyah city, has been polluted by untreated wastewater for decades. It joins the Sirwan River to form the Diyala River, which is a tributary of the Tigris, the great river of Mesopotamia that together with the Euphrates gives life to all of Iraq. The direct impact on residents is twofold because they use water for drinking and farming. In partnership with Humat Dijlah, and in coordination with the Sulaymaniyah governorate’s Department of Environment, Waterkeepers Iraq-Kurdistan has organized the “Tanjaro River Threat Assessment and Outreach Project” to raise awareness about environmental threats surrounding this small river. The advocacy NGO organizes regular cleaning campaigns at lakes and rivers in the Kurdistan region.
Meanwhile, Neighboring Turkey and Iran’s dam projects have reduced water flow into Iraq. While Iraq and Syria have signed up to the UN Watercourses Convention of 1997—under which nations are obligated to equitably share their neighbors’ water resources—Turkey and Iran have not.
The spokesperson for Iraq’s water ministry said that since last year, water levels in the Euphrates and Tigris rivers had dropped by more than half.
Water activists have reported severe water scarcity in areas from Diyala governorate all the way south to Basra, complaining dams reduce the proportion of water quotas, especially in southern Iraq.
“Up until 1998, we were two big families here cultivating a large output of vegetables and living entirely on our food products. We would always have extra yield to give to other families,” Bakr Sdeeq Hussein, 54, recounted, speaking to Toward Freedom in Chaqlawa. “As water pollution and scarcity gradually hit most of my agricultural production, I decided to cultivate only wheat and few fruits (pomegranates, peaches, apples). I had planted 30 small trees last year. Sadly, all of them died.”
The villager’s subsistence today depends on his taxi business.
Save the Tigris, a civil society advocacy campaign that promotes water justice in the Mesopotamian basin, recently issued a report raising the alarm on the rising volumes of water lost due to evaporation from Iraq’s dam reservoirs.
Rahim argued food production in the Kurdish region is facing a crisis as a result of low precipitation and declining river levels from upstream countries. “Desertification is threatening 70 percent of the country’s agricultural lands,” he said, citing an Iraqi health and environment ministry report. Rahim added that would soon make it “impossible to grow anything.”
Taha Ali Karim on his plot of land in Chaqlawa in Iraqi Kurdistan / credit: Alessandra Bajec
‘Never Sure When We Have Water’
Back in the day, 65-year-old Taha Ali Karim used to grow and market several products, such as tomatoes, cucumbers, courgettes and aubergines. From the beginning of 2000, he saw his yield decreasing until it stopped bearing its fruit. “Before then, we were mainly relying on rainwater, and especially on Tanjaro River which once had clean water to irrigate the land,” said the 65-year-old, dressed in a white shirt and light-gray baggy pants. “We also had two or three springs.” Now, the river is polluted and the springs have dried up.
Today, he shares his well with two more families, carefully monitoring water volumes and making sure there’s enough for all of them.
“We can’t sell what we produce any more,” he said. “We’ve lost our passion to do farming since we’re not seeing an outcome.”
Karim, who also acts as a village representative, reported contamination of Tanjaro River, water scarcity and economic backlash against reduced food production are some of the residents’ major concerns. His formal written complaints have been met with little to no cooperation. Karim warned 80 percent of water wells in Chaqlawa will run dry in the future. The only solution he sees is for one large reservoir, around 200 meters deep. He requested several times that governorate authorities look into it, but hasn’t received any answer.
“We feel abandoned in many ways, starting with the fact that we can’t access clean water,” he reiterated, estimating the daily water supply at two-and-a-half hours for each well. “Because we depend on our water wells, we can never be sure when we have water and when we don’t.”
At about 15 minutes away from the hamlet, in Naw Grdan—a village made up of 370 houses totaling some 1,800 inhabitants—Mohamed Tofiq, 54, in an all-black outfit with a waist band wrapped around the top of his pants, waved a hand from afar welcoming this reporter to enter his home.
“It’s been really damaging,” the cattle breeder told Toward Freedom. “There’s very little rain, we have no springs, our wells are drying up fast.”
Although he has three water wells, they are located on his farmland. That is far from where he lives, making collecting water a tedious task.
The majority of residents either draw clean water from wells or buy potable water. For non-drinking purposes, some may even purchase trucks of water from Tanjaro River despite it being unsafe.
The effect of water scarcity on stockbreeding has been drastic, given how much water they consume.
“Since we’ve been having less and less rainfall, I sometimes have to take my farm animals 3 to 4 kilometers outside the village to find greener pastures for grazing,” the 54-year-old noted.
“Before I had 120 cows, I was selling 10 every month and buying another five right away because I could easily re-sell beef cattle to butcher shops,” Tofiq said. “Now, I have 60 baby cows, and sell five or six in a month.”
He explained that, with the increased expenses involved in animal feeding, it is not worth investing into the production of dairies. That is especially because of recent greater reliance on imports. He just keeps a cow to produce milk, cheese and yogurt for his family.
The cow breeder also indicated that cultivation of wheat and barley—the only crops grown in the village—has dropped in the last couple of years. Now, less than a quarter of the population grow them.
Tofiq, whom Naw Grdan community members tapped as an unofficial representative, pointed out the main problem villagers encounter is the government’s lack of planning for the agriculture sector. That includes ensuring efficient water management and a fair provision of water resources, as well as supporting farmers by different means, such as with machinery, tools, fertilizers and financial incentives.
One proposal he put forward to the governorate was to create a big water reservoir to sustain the villagers, after a team of geologists found last year large groundwater reserves in Naw Grdan. Alternatively, he suggested, the water supply network that serves greater Sulaymaniyah should be linked to the village.
Four New Dams
A combination of a semi-arid climate, drought conditions, decline in rainfall, and decreasing water levels in the Euphrates and Tigris rivers arriving from upstream neighbors have compromised farmers’ ability to grow food in Iraq and in the Kurdish region.
According to a report published by the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) in August of last year, wheat production in the Kurdistan region is expected to decrease by half because of the drought. Further research the NRC released last December found more than one-third of wheat farmers in drought-affected regions of Iraq faced crop failure in 2021. This impacted average monthly income, which dropped below survival rates in six governorates, leaving one in five families without enough food.
The Iraqi Ministry of Agriculture announced at the beginning of July that desertification threatens more than 50 percent of Iraq’s available farmland. Water shortages and dry climate had already forced the Iraqi government last October to order farmers to cultivate only half of the arable land during the winter.
The Iraqi water resources ministry warned in April that the country’s water reserves had decreased by half since 2021. The same ministry anticipated in a report released towards the end of last year that, unless urgent action is taken to fight against declining water volumes, Iraq’s two main rivers will be entirely dry by 2040
Moreover, the World Bank forecast in November that Iraq could suffer a 20-percent drop in drinking water by 2050.
Rahim echoed some of the calls by Humat Dijlah and Waterkeepers Iraq-Kurdistan for the protection of waterways that include “efficient water use” through advocacy to government officials and public awareness, prevention and removal of dams, and “serious steps from the government” to negotiate with Iran and Turkey and demand Iraq’s share of water. He maintained that the Iraqi central government and the KRG need to cooperate on water security issues.
The water campaigner slammed the KRG’s plan to build another four large dams as well as Turkey’s discussed building of the Cizre. “We already have two big dams in Kurdistan, they are not even half full,” he underlined. “We don’t need to see more dams built.”
Instead, he proposed, small reservoirs could be created in farmlands to manage water resources suitably around farming communities.
A staff person in charge of media relations at the KRG’s Ministry of Agriculture and Water Resources didn’t respond to written questions, despite initially welcoming them.
The Kurdish region is in the midst of a water crisis, some of which has been blamed on poor water management and lack of funds. Diar Gharib Latif, head of the Sulaymaniyah governorate’s Directorate of Environment, acknowledged that, stressing the need for a “serious management system” to protect water resources and to mobilize “necessary capital” for it.
He also emphasized wastewater treatment should be introduced to stop waterways from being contaminated, with high pollution loads advancing through the KRI down to Iraq’s southern governorate of Basra, one of the most polluted cities in Iraq. With water reserves dwindling, water quality deterioration additionally reduces available supplies.
“We have faced drought for two years now. At our directorate, we are pushing for a decree law in the Kurdistan parliament that aims to protect water resources qualitatively and quantitatively,” Latif told Toward Freedom. He added that the agriculture and irrigation committee within parliament would be tasked with further discussing finding solutions to water shortages and budgeting for a plan.
“We wish to receive the needed funds so that we can respond to the drought and other water-related issues in a scientific way and with good strategy planning,” he alluded to the ongoing budget disputes between the federal government in Baghdad and the semi-autonomous KRG.
Expressing concern for the suffering of the agricultural sector in the KRI, the local official anticipated that, if the drought drags on for another year, not only it will be a devastating blow to agriculture and food security overall, but the environmental impact will be severe, too.
He insisted that Iraq should have effective water negotiations with its neighbors and finalize an agreement. To date, there is no international treaty for the Euphrates-Tigris basin, leaving Iraq exposed to unilateral alterations of water flows by Turkey and Iran.
KRG’s authorities allocated 21 billion Iraqi dinars (roughly $14 million) to maintain the water distribution network in the Kurdish regional capital of Erbil ahead of the summer season. Regional officials said they were digging more than 130 new wells to stem water scarcity, though that could also negatively impact the performance of pre-existing wells.
In an attempt to diminish the effects of the drought, the KRG ministry signed in March a memorandum of understanding with Power China to build four dams in Erbil, Sulaymaniyah and Duhok.
At the Second International Water Conference in Baghdad held last March, Iraq’s ministries of water resources and of the environment signed new cooperation agreements to support a joint approach to tackling the water problem. International and Iraqi NGOs demanded that these and other relevant agreements and policies be effectively funded and implemented, including the 2009 Law on Protection and Improvement of the Environment and the 2001 Law on Conservation of Water Resources, both of which prohibit the dumping of waste and discharge of pollutants in public waters.
In the meantime, the situation remains dire for Iraq’s farmers.
“We expect the harvest to be really bad,” Hussein said. “Most crops will die since we have far from enough water to survive the summer heat.”
Alessandra Bajec is a freelance journalist specializing in West Asia and North Africa. Between 2010 and 2011, she lived in Palestine. Then she was based in Cairo from 2013 to 2017. Since 2018, Bajec has lived in Tunis.
