A water shortage brought about by a lack of rainfall and Turkey’s blocking of the Euphrates river’s water upstream has farmers in Kobane worried.
“There was no rainfall. The land has dried up. There was no rain. We do not have products to harvest. We were forced to let the sheep eat them,” Muslim Ali, a farmer from Kobane said on Sunday.
Turkey, where the Euphrates river starts, has frequently been accused of weaponizing water.
Turkey and Syria signed an agreement in 1987 that stipulates Turkey should release from its dams 500 cubic meters of water per second down the Euphrates and across the border. In dams on the Syrian stretch of the river, Kurdish authorities say that Ankara has manipulated the water flow since they took charge when they established the autonomous administration of Rojava.
Today, the water flow is less than 200 cubic meters per second, according to Rojava’s General Administration of Dams.
“A lack of rainfall and the cutting off of the [Euphrates] water flows [by Turkey] have caused massive damage to trees and farmland,” Sawsan Daban, co-head of the Plantation Board in Kobane.
“Farmers depending on the Euphrates river water to irrigate their products, such as barley, wheat and lentils will lose 20 percent of their crops due to reduced levels of the Euphrates River. And other farmland that relies only on rainwater, will lose 80 percent of their land,” she added.
Snow and rainfall have been below average across the Euphrates and Tigris River basins this year, including in Turkey, which is experiencing an intense drought.
Translation by Zhelwan Z. Wali
