Drying Euphrates sounds alarm bells in Syria

Aid groups and engineers have warned of a looming humanitarian disaster in northeastern Syria amid a drop in water levels of the country’s longest river, the Euphrates.

In the village of Rumayleh in Alepp Province, Khaled al-Khamees, a 50-year-old farmer, said, "It's as if we were in the desert."

"We're thinking of leaving because there's no water left to drink or irrigate the trees," AFP cited Khamees as saying on Monday.

Aid groups and engineers say that five million Syrians are at risk of water and power cutoffs amid declining water levels at hydroelectric dams since January.

The waning river flow adds to the woes of the people there after a decade of foreign-backed militancy and amid a coronavirus pandemic.

Khamees, the father of 12, said he had not seen the river so far away from the village in decades.

"The women have to walk seven kilometres (four miles) just to get a bucket of water for their children to drink," he added.

At the Tishrin Dam, the first of three hydroelectric dams into which the river falls inside Syria, Director Hammoud al-Hadiyyeen described the decline in water levels as "alarming", noting that it has not been seen since the dam's completion in 1999.

"It's a humanitarian catastrophe," he added.

The water level now hovers just tens of centimeters above "dead level" when turbines are supposed to completely stop generating power.

Electricity production has dropped by 70 percent across northeast Syria since last year, the Head of the Energy Authority Welat Darwish said.

Humanitarian groups also noted that two out of three of all potable water stations along the river are pumping less water or have stopped working.

ME