{"id":35735,"date":"2018-07-04T06:51:32","date_gmt":"2018-07-04T11:51:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35735"},"modified":"2018-07-04T06:51:32","modified_gmt":"2018-07-04T11:51:32","slug":"iraq-is-threatened-by-catastrophic-drought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35735","title":{"rendered":"Iraq is Threatened by Catastrophic Drought"},"content":{"rendered":"

Iraq is Threatened by Catastrophic Drought<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Photo by Jayel Aheram | CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cI once rescued a friend from drowning when he was swept away by the force of the current as we were swimming in the Diyala river,\u201d says Qasim Sabti, a painter and gallery owner in Baghdad.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was fifty years ago,\u201d he recalls. \u201cI went back there recently and the water in the Diyala is so shallow today that a man could walk across it with his dog.\u201d<\/p>\n

The rivers of\u00a0Iraq<\/a>, above all the Tigris and Euphrates, are drying up.\u00a0The country is becoming more arid, and desertification is eating into the limited amount of agricultural land.<\/p>\n

Dams built upriver in\u00a0Turkey<\/a>,\u00a0Syria<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Iran<\/a>\u00a0since the 1970s have reduced the flow of water that reaches Iraq by as much as half and the situation is about to get worse.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn 1 July, Turkey will start filling the Ilisu dam on the Tigris and this will cause another decline in the inflows to our country of about 50 per cent,\u201d Hassan Janabi, minister of water resources, told\u00a0The Independent<\/em>.<\/p>\n

He says that Iraq used to get 30 billion cubic metres of water a year from the Euphrates, but now \u201cwe are happy if we get 16 billion cubic metres\u201d.<\/p>\n

As Iraq begins to recover from 40 years of wars and emergences, its existence is being threatened by the rapidly falling water levels in the two great rivers on which its people depend.<\/p>\n

It was on their banks that the first cities were established cities 8,000 years ago and where the flood stories of Gilgamesh and the Bible were first told.<\/p>\n

Such floods are now a thing of the past \u2013 the last was in 1988 \u2013 and each year the amount of water taken by Iraq\u2019s neighbours has been rising.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Iraq is Threatened by Catastrophic Drought Photo by Jayel Aheram | CC BY 2.0 \u201cI once rescued a friend from drowning when he was swept away by the force of the current as we were swimming in the Diyala river,\u201d says Qasim Sabti, a painter and gallery owner in Baghdad. \u201cThat was fifty years ago,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[5493,220,442,13056],"class_list":["post-35735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-counterpunch","tag-drought","tag-iraq","tag-patrick-cockburn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35735"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35735\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35736,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35735\/revisions\/35736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}