Initiative in Syria’s Qamishli calls Paris Agreement to pressure Turkey
QAMISHLI, Syria (North Press) – On Sunday, an environmental initiative in Qamishli, northeast Syria, called the signatories to the Paris climate agreement to put pressure on Turkey to release the Euphrates River water to Syria to avoid unpredictable disasters.
Paris Agreement is the first global agreement that aims to respond to the global climate change threat by limiting global warming and keeping it below two degrees Celsius and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
A statement on behalf of the environmental initiative “Green Tresses”, read in front of the journalists in the initiative nursery at the University of Rojava, said that Turkey’s lowering of the Euphrates water level heralds a humanitarian and environmental disaster along the river in Syria and Iraq.
“Cutting Syria’s share of the Euphrates is not something new. Turkey had previously cut the water of the rivers of al-Khabur, Sajur, Jaqjak and al-Aswad, which are no longer rivers or even tributaries because of the total cutoff of water to them,” the statement added.
The statement warned that “these practices negatively affect the environmental situation in the areas of the Euphrates Basin, which are threatened by desertification due to the lack of vegetation cover.”
The risks are not limited to their direct effects on humans, but also “directly affect the environment, the ecological balance, the climate, the nature of the area, livestock and fish, vegetation cover and soil fertility,” according to the statement.
Water seizure will also cause imbalance of the biological diversity and the loss of plant and animal species that will be unable to grow and reproduce in an adequate manner, according to the statement.
The initiative indicated that this decline in the level of the river “will become a main factor in the massive spread of epidemics, especially after the outbreak of coronavirus whose prevention requires attention to hygiene and the use of clean water.”
In the fall of 2020, volunteers in the city of Qamishli launched an environmental initiative known as “Green Tresses”, to fight desertification and improve environmental conditions.
For more than three months, Turkey has limited the flow of the Euphrates into Syria, depriving large numbers of people of usable water. Turkey reduced the flow of water from the Euphrates River into northeast Syria’s dam gradually, reducing the amount of water received to unprecedented lows.
Turkey keeps water in six dams, the largest of which is Ataturk Dam, the second largest in the Middle East, with a storage capacity of 48 billion m³, violating the international agreement they signed with Syria in 1987 which stated that Syria’s share of water coming from Turkey is 500 m³ per second.
The water flow to the Euphrates River is now limited to less than 200 cubic meters, according to the General Administration of Dams in Northeastern Syria.