“The Ministry of Water Resources submitted a memorandum and an official letter to the higher authorities in the Council of Ministers, the president’s office, the [parliament] speaker’s office, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to file a case at the international court in The Hague to establish Iraq’s water rights with neighbouring Iran,” technical advisor to the ministry Aoun Dhiab told state media.
Iraq is heavily dependent on water sources that are shared with neighbouring countries Iran and Turkey, which are both building dams on their rivers.
Baghdad signed an agreement with Ankara that includes “a fair and equitable quota for Iraq across the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers” and came into force earlier this month, said Water Resources Minister Mehdi al-Hamdani.
The ministry had hoped to reach a similar deal with Tehran, but failed to do so this summer, partly because of a new government in Iran and elections in Iraq, according to Dhiab.
This is not the first time Baghdad has made such a threat. In July, Minister Hamdani suggested taking Tehran to the international court after it stopped the flow of water to Diyala completely.
Tehran has accused Baghdad of holding political motives in their dispute over water and says that while Iran has been subjected to years of drought, Iraq’s situation is much better as farmers are able to use the flow of water from the Euphrates and Tigris.
Iran says the Iraqi establishment is to blame for their water shortages, pointing to a failure of successive Iraqi governments to implement a water policy or build new infrastructure like dams since the 1960s, while the population has grown from 10 million in the 1970s to 40 million today.
"The area under agricultural cultivation in Iraq in 1970 was 6 million hectares... Data from the Iraqi ministry of agriculture last March said that the total land under cultivation was 3.75 million hectares," state-run IRNA reported on July 27 after Baghdad threatened to take Iran to court.
IRNA went on to blame the US for keeping Iraq “backward” for the last 18 years and noted a lot of water goes to waste in Iraq where the government has not installed water meters in residential houses.
The Iraqi government last week announced it would slash in half the amount of land it will irrigate for winter crops. The province of Diyala is not included in the irrigation scheme and farmers there will have to depend on wells for their fields.
Diyala is fed by several rivers that originate in and are dammed by Iran, including the Sirwan.
Dhiab warned that “Winter agriculture is currently subjected to great limitations in Diyala due to the lack of sufficient water coming from Iran.”
Related: Kurdistan’s stolen rivers
The Middle East is the most water-insecure regions in the world and the situation will be made worse because of climate change. This year was a dry year across Iran, Iraq, and Turkey.
Iraq and Syria, which also shares the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, have signed up to the United Nations Watercourses Convention of 1997 governing sources that cross borders, but Turkey and Iran have not.
