As a leader of one of the oldest gnostic religions in the world, Sheikh Nidham Kreidi al-Sabahi must use only water taken from a flowing river, even for drinking.
The 68-year-old has a long grey beard hanging over his simple tan robe and a white cap covering his equally long hair, which sheikhs are forbidden from cutting. He says he has never got ill from drinking water from the Tigris River and believes that as long as the water is flowing, it is clean. But the truth is that soon it may not be flowing at all.
Iraq’s famed Tigris is heavily polluted and at risk of drying up. Unless urgent action is taken to save the river, life will be fundamentally altered for the ancient communities who live on its banks.
“No water, no life,” says Sheikh Nidham, a Mandaean religious leader living in the southern Iraqi city of Amarah, on the banks of the river in which he has been regularly immersed since he was a month old.
Mandaeans are members of one of the oldest gnostic religions in the world. Southern Iraq has been their homeland for more than a thousand years, particularly in Maysan province. Amarah, the provincial capital, is built around the Tigris. Water is central to their faith and every major life event requires ritual purification. Marriage ceremonies begin in water, and before drawing their last breath, Mandaeans should be taken to the river for a final cleansing.
“For our religion, the importance of water is like air. Without water, life wouldn’t exist. At the beginning of creation, Adam was the first man on Earth. Before Adam there was water, and water was one of the elements that created Adam,” Sheikh Nidham explains.
The Tigris is one of the two famous rivers that cradle Mesopotamia and once formed part of the “fertile crescent”. The river rises in south-east Turkey, and runs the length of Iraq, through its two largest cities, Mosul and Baghdad, until it joins the Euphrates; together, as the Shatt al-Arab, they finish their journey south to the Gulf.
Here, on the banks of these rivers, the history of the world was changed. Large-scale agriculture was first developed, the first words were written, and the wheel was invented. Today the Tigris waters are used for irrigation, transport, industry, power generation, and drinking for the estimated 18 million Iraqis who live within its basin.
“All the life of Iraqis depends on the water. All the civilisation and all the stories that you hear, it depends on those two rivers. It’s more than water to drink or to irrigate or to use or to wash … It’s more even than spirituality,” says Salman Khairalla, the founder of Humat Dijlah, a non-governmental organisation dedicated to protecting the river.
But the health of the river has been in decline for decades. Iraq had state-of-the-art water infrastructure until the US made it a target in 1991’s Operation Desert Storm. With treatment plants destroyed, sewage flowed into the waterways. Years of sanctions and conflict mean the infrastructure has never fully recovered. Today, across southern and central Iraq, just 30% of urban households are connected to a sewage treatment facility. That number drops to 1.7% in rural areas.
In addition to municipal waste, chemical fertilisers and pesticides in agricultural runoff, industrial waste including from the oil sector, and medical refuse all find their way into the river. A 2022 study found that water quality at numerous sites in Baghdad was rated “poor” or “very poor”. In 2018, at least 118,000 people in the southern city of Basra were treated in hospital after drinking contaminated water.
The river has also dramatically shrunk in volume. In the past 30 years, Turkey has built major dams on the Tigris and the amount of water reaching Baghdad has decreased by 33%. Iran too has built dams and diverted water away from shared rivers that feed the Tigris. Within Iraq, water is frequently overused, especially in the agricultural sector that uses at least 85% of the country’s surface water.
The climate crisis is taking a toll. Iraq has recorded a 30%decline in precipitation and is in the grip of its worst drought in nearly a century. Demand for fresh water is expected to exceed supply by 2035. This summer, the Tigris was so low people could easily walk across it.
Khairalla believes that upstream dams and mismanagement are the areas of biggest concern because as the river’s volume drops, the concentration of pollutants increases. “The water quality depends on the quantity,” he said.
The Iraqi government has had to repeatedly press its northern neighbour to release more water from its dams. Wastage in Iraq is one of the concerns frequently raised by Turkish officials in these discussions.
In November, Baghdad and Ankara signed a mechanism to tackle some of the river’s problems: stopping pollution, introducing modern irrigation technologies, reclaiming agricultural land, and improving water governance. It has been described as an “oil-for-water” accord as infrastructure projects will be undertaken by Turkish companies and paid for with oil funds. The Iraqi foreign ministry touted it as a “first of its kind” deal.
The agreement, however, has drawn harsh criticism from experts, environmental activists, and the public, who are concerned about the lack of detail that has been released, that it appears to hand Ankara control of Iraq’s water resources, and is not officially binding.
“There is no actual agreement right now,” said Mohsen al-Shammari, a former minister of water resources. “I would say it’s more like election propaganda.” The deal was signed just nine days before Iraq’s general election.
Iraq’s water ministry, environment ministry, and government spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.
Without water, Sheikh Nidham fears for the future of Mandaeans in southern Iraq. Many have already left the country or moved upstream to the autonomous Kurdistan region. Estimates put their worldwide population at between 60,000 and 100,000, with fewer than 10,000 remaining in Iraq. A dying Tigris may be the final nail in the coffin.
