Iraq – Filling the “Ilisu” Turkish dam exacerbates the water crisis in Iraq

Baghdad-Iraq 6/6/2018

Although the Iraqi Minister of Water Resources, Hassan al-Janabi, confirmed that water has been secured for drinking and irrigating about 600 thousand acres of summer crops and one million acres of orchards, and although he pointed out to the fact that the Tigris River has better tributary than the Euphrates River, but MP Adel Nuri pointed out that there are dozens of dams that reduce the water level in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and this needs an action from the concerned officials to move the international community and to develop timely and strategic solutions to prevent the aggravation of the problem, while Aoun Dhiab, adviser to the Ministry of Water Resources and water and dams expert, believes that the negative impact on the Tigris River did not only come from the “Ilisu” Dam, which Turkey recently began to fill, but the decline in the rainfall last fall also had a negative impact on the amount of water, therefore, Iraq has not been supplied with sufficient quantities of water.