Tribune. Thirsting and starving enemy populations in order to annihilate them is a method of warfare as old as war itself. However, this approach was believed to be relegated to the barbaric times before modern international laws intended to regulate conflicts – and above all to protect civilians – under the careful vigilance of the United Nations.
Faced with the Kurds, Turkey is showing today that this is not the case. She behaves as we used to behave in the past. In his obsessive drive to end these Kurds he despises, Turkish President Erdogan uses a terrifying and forgotten weapon he had until now kept in reserve – and which most Western officials have failed to measure : the water.
With this harmlessly worded weapon, Erdogan can quietly wage a war of attrition against Kurdish civilians, insidious, without sensationalism and without firing a single shot. A war as silent as it is devastating in its long-term effects. Within the carnivorous world which is settling down, Turkey thus demonstrates that it does not bother with any scruples, does not respect any common rule and plays the policy of fait accompli whenever its interests push it, convinced that only the balance of power matters.
A terrible artificial drought
But what exactly is the “water war”? The situation is as follows: by the coincidence of geography, the Turkish mountains are the “water tower” of this region of the Middle East. The Tigris and Euphrates are born there before leaving to irrigate Syria and Iraq – countries in the north of which the Kurds live. On these two mythical and gigantic rivers, Ankara has long built a series of dams to control their flows. These are the “taps” that the Turks have been gradually closing for months. 80% right now.
First consequence: a terrible artificial drought has settled in the arable plains where the Kurds live – this famous breadbasket of the Fertile Crescent – and no more correct irrigation of food crops can be done there. Second consequence: food prices continue to rise, society is gradually fracturing, in a new competition for access to the little water available, famine will threaten when the harvests are no more than a shadow of themselves, and more and more Kurds are thinking of immigrating massively, in a despair that did not exist a few months ago.
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