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The longest river in Syria used to flow through his olive grove, but Khalid Khamis said that it has now receded far away, drying up his trees, leaving his family with almost no water to drink.
“It’s as if we are in the desert,” the 50-year-old farmer said, standing on the bed of the Euphrates River last year.
“We are considering leaving because there is no water to drink or irrigate the trees.”
Aid groups and engineers warned that a humanitarian disaster is imminent in northeastern Syria. After a decade of war, the reduction in river flow is exacerbating the predicament.
They said that during the coronavirus pandemic and the economic crisis, the water levels of hydroelectric dams have fallen sharply since January, threatening the water supply and power outages of up to 5 million Syrians.
As the drought swept across the Mediterranean, many people in Kurdish-controlled areas accused neighboring and long-time enemy Turkey of weaponizing water by tightening upstream taps, although Turkish sources deny this.
Outside the Rumayleh village where al-Khamees lived, after the river receded, the black irrigation hose was covered with dusty coils, and the running cost of the water pump was too high.
On the contrary, closer to the water’s edge, al-Khamees and neighbors are busy planting corn and beans in the soil that was submerged in water last year.
The father of the 12-year-old said that he hadn’t seen the river so far from the village in decades.
“Women must walk 7 kilometers [4 miles] Just to get their children a bucket of water to drink,” he said.
The Euphrates River is reputed to have flown over the Garden of Eden in the Bible, spanning Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, with a total length of nearly 2,800 kilometers (1,700 miles).
When it rains, it will flow into northern Syria through the Turkish border, and then diagonally across the war-torn country towards Iraq.
Along the way, it irrigated large tracts of land in Syrian granaries and passed through three hydroelectric dams to provide electricity and drinking water for millions of people.
But in the past eight months, the river has shrunk into strips, sucking precious water from the reservoir and increasing the risk of the dam’s turbines shutting down.
At the Tishrin Dam, which is the first river in Syria, director Hammoud al-Hadiyyeen described “astonishing” that has not been seen since the completion of the dam in 1999 The water level drops.
“This is a humanitarian disaster,” he said.
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