Every school-age child knows the name: Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent, Cradle of Civilization. Today, much of this land is turning to dust.
The word Mesopotamia means the land between the rivers. This is where the wheel was invented, where irrigation flourished and where the first known writing system was born. Some experts say the river here nourished the fabled Hanging Gardens of Babylon and converged into the biblical Garden of Eden.
Now, in some villages near the Euphrates, so little water is left that people have to tear down houses brick by brick, pile them on trucks and drive away.
“If I say it now, you probably won’t believe it, but this was once a place with water,” said Sheikh Adnan al Sahlani, a science teacher near Naseriya in southern Iraq. ) explain.
Today “there is no water everywhere,” he said. All those left are “slowly dying”.
Until the 20th century, the southern Iraqi city of Basra was known as the Venice of the East for its network of canals and gondola-like boats passing through nearby neighborhoods.
For most of its history, the Fertile Crescent—often defined as the area that encompasses present-day Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Iran, the West Bank, and large swaths of Gaza—has had no shortage of water, and several has been inspiring for centuries. Artists and writers have depicted the area as an ancient and lush land. Spring floods are common, and rice, one of the most water-intensive crops, has been grown for more than 2,000 years.
But now, nearly 40 percent of Iraq’s land has been encroached by deserts, taking tens of thousands of acres of arable land every year.
Scientists say climate change and desertification are to blame. So did weak governance and a reliance on wasteful irrigation techniques dating back thousands of years to Sumerian times.
Another pervasive global culprit: a growing population and a rising demand for water, not only because of the size of the population but, in many places, because of rising living standards.
In Iraq, the fallout is destroying societies, sparking deadly clashes between villages, displacing thousands every year, fueling extremists and making more and more land look like the barren surface of the moon.
Dry and dirty rivers and groundwater are fueling outbreaks of cholera, typhoid and hepatitis A. Rivers and canals have receded so low that Islamic State militants can easily cross them to attack villages and security posts, and fish farmers are threatening farmers. Government regulators have tried closing them for violating water restrictions.
In many areas, water pumped from below the surface is too salty to drink due to water scarcity, agricultural runoff and untreated waste. “Even my cows don’t drink it,” said one farmer.
Iraq and its neighbors have issued a warning to the rest of the Middle East and the rest of the world.
“This is one of the first places where there is some kind of extreme death, specifically, from climate change,” said Charles Iceland, director of water security at the World Resources Institute.
Iraqis get their water from the government in red plastic buckets, about 600 liters per household per month. Sahrani, who lives in the village of Albujuma, said that even with little use, it lasts only a week in the heat.
As late as the 1970s and 1980s, Iraq built dams and artificial lakes to contain the massive winter rain and snowmelt overflows from the Taurus Mountains, the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates.