Hello to you all
This is an interesting topic that has been discussed for some times here in the Arab world, in the last 20 years to be more precise. The issue here is water wars. For the last 30 years, there were more drought years than rain ones, and even those years which had rain the effect was undermined by hotter weather in Spring and Summer and the rain was barely above average, except 1992-1993, 97-98 and 2006-2007 which were exceptional. The Arab world is the most affected place in the world by this problem. exploding population coupled by failed economies, corrupt regimes and depleting underground water resourses, non of the Arab countries have any kind of control on the rivers inside them since all of them rise in other countries, the Orontus being the exception. What is even worse the region is already inflamable with Israel, another water deficient state and in desperate need for more water, tying any peace deal it has with its neighbours with water rights. it already takes more water from the Jordan and Yarmouk rivers than Jordan and Syria despite the fact that the latter rises and drains in Jordan and Syria and Israel has no claim on it.
The problem is exacerbated by Turkey which also takes a higher propotion of the Orontus river and gives less proportion of the Tigres and Euphrates to both Syria and Iraq. Several times in the last decade the Turkish government completely stopped the flow of the Euphrates to fill the GAP project dams and didn't compensate Syria for the water that didn't come. At one time a whole stretch of the River was completely waterless and the Thawrah damn nearly dried up because of these closures. While Turkey has been willing to discuss the matter into a treaty and since the AKP government came cooperated fully with the Syrian authorities especially on technical matters Iran refuses to do so. It already completely diverted the qarun river from flowing into Shatt Al-Arab, Already claims half the Shatt waters and refuses any control from the Iraqi side on the flow from the Tigres or the Euphrates and certain elements in the regime still have dreams of uniting to two banks and completely make the shatt an Iranian river.
But what is probably the worst situation though it has not yet surfaced is the Nile river problem. Most of the Nile river water goes to Egypt based on old agreements. The reason was colonial and logistic, egypt recieves very little rain, the Averge rainfall in Aswan in the far south is 5 mm yearly and in Cairo in the far north 25 mm and this is not regular at all. Sudan on the other hand has much more rainfall, between 200 and 3000 mm, and many rivers flowing from other well rained countries. The exception to all the Nile basin countries is Ethiopia, that country has the largest population in Africa. Though the Ethiopian highland recieves upto 2000 mm a year in monsonal rainfall, water mismanagement and extreme poverty led some in the government to suggest a new treaty in which Ethiopia in particular would get more water than the current allocation, namely establish dams on the blue nile. Egypt which is already suffering from water deficit threatened with all out war if the Nile was touched and it directed its wrath particularly on the Sudanese opposition which had the support of egypt for a very long time. So what do you think? here are some links about the subject:
Al-Jassas