Water in Syria

Syria's water system carries two catastrophes. The first is the 2007–10 drought that broke its groundwater farm economy on the eve of war. The second is the war itself: dams fought over, treatment plants dead, engineers scattered, and national water supply cut by an estimated 30 to 40%.⁴ With the political rupture of late 2024, reconstruction has moved from hypothetical to imminent. Water will be its first chapter, from Aleppo's mains to the Euphrates pumps.

The transition government inherited a sector at its lowest point in living memory. FAO rated the 2025 drought one of the worst in nearly 40 years, and wheat output was expected at 0.9 to 1.1 million tonnes.²³ OCHA estimated that about 10 million people were struggling to meet basic water needs.¹³ The 1987 interim accord with Türkiye promises an average of 500 m³/s at the border.¹⁴

A quick-reference dashboard for Syria: headline economy and water indicators⁴⁵⁴⁶, water stress against the scarcity thresholds, non-conventional supply, and the institutions behind the sector. The commercial picture, with buyers, deal structures and the project pipeline, is in the market brief.

One interactive map of Syria's water, built from real geodata. Climate & drought maps the aridity gradient (WorldClim) with warming projections. The WRI Aqueduct layers, covering overall water risk, water stress and flood risk (plus groundwater decline where the trend is significant), shade every river sub-basin by its 0–5 risk score. Demand shows where the population, and the water demand, concentrate. Infrastructure brings the physical system together: rivers, dams (FAO AQUASTAT), treatment plants, desalination and the major conveyors. Hover any sub-basin or marker for detail; sources are cited under each view.

Syria has four physical regions. A coastal strip lies below mountains and highlands that run north to south, parallel to the sea.¹⁵ East of them lie the interior plains of Damascus, Homs, Hama, Aleppo, Hassakeh and Daraa. The Badia and desert plains stretch south-east toward Jordan and Iraq.¹⁵ The country covers 185,180 km², and about 5.91 million ha, 32% of it, was cultivable in 2005.¹⁵

Rainfall

Rain falls mostly in winter and thins out quickly inland. The coast receives 800–1,000 mm a year and the mountains up to 1,400 mm.¹⁵ The western plains and foothills get 300–600 mm, and much of the interior 100–200 mm. The national average is 252 mm.¹⁵ Station normals for 1961–1990 show the gap. Safita, in the coastal hills, recorded 1,130.5 mm a year, and Tell Abyad in the north 296.7 mm.¹ Summers are very dry, with high evaporation.¹

Single years swing hard. In 2025 rainfall fell by nearly 70%, crippling 75% of the country’s rain-fed farmland.⁷ The severe drought of 1998–99 cost 21.6 billion Syrian pounds at the prices of the time.¹

Heat and drought

Summer temperatures pass 30 °C in most regions and at times 40 °C.¹ The daily range can reach 32 °C in the interior, against about 13 °C on the coast.¹⁵ Heat waves push temperatures 5–7 °C above the monthly average, and severe waves 8–10 °C.¹ The initial national communication reports that heat waves and dust storms are increasing, especially in the east.¹ Winter rainfall has declined over five decades in the north and north-east. Autumn rainfall has risen in the north and centre.¹

The 2007–2010 drought was the worst in the instrumental record for the Fertile Crescent. Human influence on the climate made a drought of that severity more than twice as likely.²⁰ Warming made the 2020–2023 drought across the Tigris–Euphrates basin, including Syria, 25 times more likely.⁶

Projections

Models point to a hotter and drier eastern Mediterranean.²⁰ In the World Bank’s CMIP6 ensemble, Syria would have about 77 more days a year above 35 °C by 2080–2099 under high emissions. It had about 72 such days in 1995–2014.⁸ The national communication’s older model runs cut annual rainfall by 20–60 mm in 2040–2069, against 1961–1990.¹ Rain-fed wheat would need 9.6% more water, 469 mm a season, and yields would fall 21% unless water is added.¹ On the coast, rising seas could flood 17.56 km² by 2100 in the lowest scenario and 118.90 km² in the most extreme.¹

Rainfall and temperature in numbers

Averaged over the whole of Syria, ERA5 reanalysis gives about 230 mm of rain a year and a mean temperature of 19.0 °C for 1991–2020. About 50% of that rain falls in December, January and February, and 4 months average less than 5 mm. Since 1971 the country has warmed by about 0.53 °C a decade. Average rainfall in 1993–2022 was about 4% lower than in 1951–1980, and single years swing widely around that.

Projected change

Source: World Bank Climate Change Knowledge Portal, retrieved September 2026. ERA5 0.25° reanalysis for the annual series (1950–2022) and the monthly climatology (1991–2020); CMIP6 0.25° multi-model ensemble median for the projections, as change against 1995–2014. These are national averages, which hide the gap between wet highlands and dry interiors, and reanalysis rainfall over deserts carries wide uncertainty.

Water is unevenly placed. The coastal basin has a relative surplus, but it is not available for general use. Most other basins are depleted, except the Badia steppe.¹ Water resources per person stood at around 1,000 m³ a year when the initial national communication was written.¹ The Euphrates, entering from Turkey, is the largest source. Turkey undertook in 1987 to release an average of at least 500 m³/s across the border.¹⁶ The aquifers of the north-east were drawn down by the pre-war irrigation boom, as the water use section describes.

The main rivers

The table ranks the rivers of Syria by the largest natural flow they reach inside the country. Natural flow is the modelled long-term average before any withdrawals. For a heavily used river it measures what the river could carry, not what arrives today.

Sources: Grill, Lehner, Thieme et al. (2019), Mapping the world’s free-flowing rivers, Nature 569, dataset under CC BY 4.0, for length, natural flow (WaterGAP, 1971–2000) and free-flowing status, meaning the share of the river’s length inside Syria still classed as free-flowing. No flow figure is given below 20 m³/s, where a global model is too coarse to rank small rivers. Dams from the FAO AQUASTAT regional inventories, matched to the nearest river reach, so a dam on a tributary close to a main stem can be counted against the main stem. The same rivers are drawn on the water map above under Rivers & lakes.

Syria withdrew 16.69 km³ of water in 2003, almost 31% more than in 1993, and 87.9% of it went to agriculture. Over the same decade municipal withdrawals rose 39% and industrial withdrawals 89%.¹⁵ The Euphrates basin supplies more than half of the blue water the country uses.¹⁶ By 2011 withdrawals had reached 160% of internal renewable resources, against 80% in Iraq and about 20% in Turkey.²⁰

The irrigation boom

Irrigated land more than doubled, from 652,000 ha in 1985 to 1.4 million ha in 2005, and then held steady.¹⁶ Groundwater drove most of the growth. Wells rose from 53,000 in 1988 to 124,000 in 1994 as the state promoted irrigated cash crops such as cotton, helped by fuel subsidies.²¹ By 2004 groundwater irrigated 60% of the equipped area. Farmers paid for subsidised energy but nothing for the water itself.¹⁵ A 2005 law required licences for new wells, but it was not enforced.²⁰

The state schemes fell short of their plans. The Euphrates Valley Project behind the Tabqa Dam targeted 640,000 ha, but gypsum soils and salinisation cut the goal to 370,000 ha.¹⁶ Official data recorded 206,987 ha irrigated from the Euphrates in 2010, plus 59,550 ha from the Khabour and Jaghjagh.¹⁶ Modern methods spread slowly. Sprinklers covered 130,200 ha in 2004, up from 30,000 ha in 1993, and drip irrigation 57,500 ha.¹⁵

Wheat, cotton and drought

Water policy served food policy. Wheat and cotton were among seven strategic crops whose official prices were normally set above world parity.²² Wheat imports fell from 1.1 million tonnes in 1989–90 to almost nothing by 1998–99, and Syria declared self-sufficiency in the mid-1990s.²²²⁰ The 2007–10 drought broke the model. After the 2008 harvest failed, Syria imported wheat in large quantities for the first time since. Up to 1.5 million people moved from farms to the edges of cities.²⁰ Drought returned in 2025, which FAO rated among the worst in nearly 40 years, and the wheat crop fell to between 0.9 and 1.1 million tonnes.²³

Withdrawals over time

FAO’s AQUASTAT estimates put Syria’s freshwater withdrawals at 3.3 billion m³ in 1975 and 14.0 billion m³ in 2022. Agriculture’s share of the total moved from 90% in 1994 to 88% in 2022.

Source: FAO AQUASTAT via the World Bank World Development Indicators, retrieved September 2026. AQUASTAT revises national figures irregularly and fills the years between surveys, so a jump between two adjacent years usually marks a new national estimate rather than a change on the ground.

Syria has 166 dams with a total storage capacity of 19.7 billion m³, FAO recorded.¹⁵ The Tabqa Dam on the Euphrates forms Lake Assad, which holds 14.1 billion m³ and covers 674 km².¹⁵ Medium dams such as Al Rastan (228 million m³), Qattinah (200 million m³) and Mouhardeh (67 million m³) cluster near Homs and Hama.¹⁵ Desalination is marginal, at 8,183 m³ a day of installed capacity in 2002.¹⁵

Before the war

In 2002 Syria produced 1,364 million m³ of wastewater and treated 550 million m³, mainly in Damascus, Aleppo, Homs and Salamieh. All treated wastewater was reused.¹⁵ In 2006, 89% of people had access to improved water sources and 92% to improved sanitation.¹⁵

War damage

The conflict cut national water supply by 30–40%, OCHA estimates.⁴ In 14 cities assessed by the World Bank, damage to water and sanitation was put at US$124.9–379.7 million.³ About 17% of assets, mostly wells and water towers, were damaged, mainly in Aleppo and Idlib.³ Some 51% suffered reduced functionality, including 11% not working at all.³ Households filled the gap with tankered water of unregulated quality, at about US$7 per m³.³ Farm infrastructure, largely irrigation systems, suffered about US$3.4 billion in damage.³ The government’s climate plan also blames “terrorist groups” for attacks on dams and irrigation networks and for poisoning water sources.²

The 2023 earthquake

The earthquakes of February 2023 added to the damage. The World Bank put water damage at US$129.7 million across nine cities and US$145.4 million across six governorates.⁴ Recovery needs reached US$232.1 million. A safety check of fissures in the Afrin and other dams became a short-term priority.⁴ In the hardest-hit areas, the share of households connected to sewers fell from 53.6% to 52.5% between December 2022 and April 2023.⁵

Rebuilding

Recovery is proceeding station by station. In June 2026 Deir Ezzor restored seven water stations once Euphrates levels had stabilised.¹⁰ In September 2026 the energy minister reopened two rehabilitated stations in Idlib, serving about 430,000 people. At al-Laj alone, 19 wells returned to service.⁹ The Energy Ministry’s strategy centres on repairing water and wastewater infrastructure, with renewable power and modern monitoring.¹¹

The asset base in numbers

Sources: FAO AQUASTAT regional dam inventories (CC BY 4.0), which list large dams with a published capacity and can lag recent construction; the MENA Water Review major projects register, where each record cites its source on the project page. The database follows large contracted projects, not the whole asset base.

The Euphrates enters Syria clean and leaves it saltier. The UN-ESCWA inventory records 248 ppm at Jarablus, rising with irrigation drainage from the Balikh and Khabour to 600–800 ppm at the Iraqi border.¹⁶ Sewage adds to the load. A UN assessment in February 2022 found that in Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor almost all untreated raw sewage went into the river. The Euphrates supplies water to between 800,000 and 1.2 million people.²⁴

The Orontes is worse. Sediment samples in 2010 exceeded guideline values for chromium, copper, nickel and zinc, with nickel at 129 ppm against a guideline of 21.¹⁸ Untreated wastewater has long been used on fodder crops. FAO reported that typhoid and hepatitis infections rose tenfold in 1995–2000 compared with the previous five years.¹⁵

Cholera

Cholera had been absent since 2009. On 10 September 2022 the health ministry declared an outbreak in Aleppo, linked to people drinking unsafe water from the Euphrates.²⁵ By 8 April 2023 it had reached all 14 governorates, with 111,084 suspected cases and 104 deaths.²⁶ It crossed into Lebanon within six weeks.²⁷ The disease returned in 2024, with 1,444 suspected cases between August and December. In May 2025 the WHO launched a new response, citing drought and damaged water systems.²⁸

The reported indicators

Sources: WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme via the World Bank; SDG 6.3.1 and 6.3.2 from the UN Statistics Division SDG database, retrieved September 2026. Safely managed means an improved source on the premises, available when needed and free from priority contamination. SDG 6.3.2 rests on each country’s own monitoring network, so a high share can mean few water bodies were assessed, and values move when methods change between reporting rounds.

Syria sits in the middle of its rivers. It lies downstream of Turkey and upstream of Iraq on the Euphrates. On the Orontes it lies downstream of Lebanon and upstream of Turkey, and on the Yarmouk it is upstream of Jordan.

The Euphrates: dams, protocols and deadlock

A 1926 convention with Turkey committed both states to coordinate their use of the Euphrates.¹⁶ Joint projects failed in the 1960s and unilateral dams followed. Turkey’s Keban reservoir and Syria’s Lake Assad behind the Tabqa Dam both began filling in the winter of 1973–74.¹⁶ Filling Tabqa cut the flow to Iraq and set off a crisis in 1975, resolved through Saudi and Soviet intervention.¹⁶ Syria joined the Joint Technical Committee with Turkey and Iraq in 1983. After 16 meetings it deadlocked in 1992.¹⁷

In 1987 Turkey undertook to release an annual average of at least 500 m³/s at the Syrian border, pending a three-way allocation that never came.¹⁶ Syria and Iraq then divided that flow, 42% to Syria and 58% to Iraq, in an accord that sources date to 1989 or 1990.¹⁶²⁹ Turkey began filling the Atatürk Dam on 13 January 1990, cutting flows to Syria and Iraq by about three-quarters for a month.³⁰ Syria completed the Tishreen Dam upstream of Lake Assad in 1999.¹⁶ In 2002 Iraq agreed that Syria could pump 1,250 MCM a year from the Tigris. A 2009 cooperation agreement with Turkey was read as Turkish approval of the scheme.¹⁷

The 500 m³/s has rarely held since the war began. Between 2014 and 2020 Syria received its full share only once, in 2019.²⁴ In spring 2021 the Kurdish-led administration said the flow from Turkey had fallen to nearly 200 m³/s, forcing the Tishreen Dam to cut power to eight hours a day. A Turkish source denied any cut and blamed the climate.³¹ In April 2025 the same administration put inflow at about 250 m³/s, with Lake Assad some 4 bcm short of its normal level.³²

Dams on the front line

The war made the Euphrates dams military objectives. ISIS took the Tabqa Dam in 2013 or 2014; sources differ.³³³⁴ In late March 2017 fighting knocked the dam out of service, and the UN warned of flooding in Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor.³⁴ The SDF declared the town and dam taken on 10 May 2017.³⁵ The SDF had held the Tishreen Dam since December 2015. After the fall of the Assad government it became a front with Turkish-backed forces, until government forces began entering it in April 2025 under an agreement with the SDF.³⁶³⁷

Alouk and Hasakah

Water became a lever in the northeast. The Alouk pumping station near Ras al-Ain served about 460,000 people by pipe and about half a million more by truck. After Turkey and allied forces seized the area in October 2019, it was entirely offline about a third of the time.²⁴ The UN counted at least 24 stoppages by July 2021.³⁸ Turkey attributed the outages to power cuts at the Derbasiyah substation.³¹ Under a January agreement between the government and the SDF, the energy ministry took over the station in April 2026. It reopened on 22 July 2026 after more than seven years out of service, with 19 of its 34 wells running.³⁸

The Orontes and the Yarmouk

On the Orontes, agreements with Lebanon in 1994 and 1997 gave Syria 323 MCM a year of the river’s Lebanese-sourced water and Lebanon 80 MCM.¹⁸ A 2009 memorandum with Turkey launched a joint Friendship Dam of 110 MCM, and construction began in 2011. The dispute over Hatay province remains unresolved.¹⁸ On the Yarmouk, the 1953 and 1987 agreements with Jordan provided for the Unity Dam and a joint commission.¹⁹ Syrian use of Yarmouk water rose to about 200 MCM a year from the mid-1970s.¹⁹ In April 2026 Damascus told Amman that Syria’s water will be shared with Jordan, and the two launched a joint platform for data exchange.³⁹⁴⁰

Since 2025

The Euphrates swung from drought to flood. In mid-May 2026 inflows reached about 2,200 m³/s, and the Euphrates Dam at Tabqa opened three spillway gates for the first time in more than three decades. At least 1,626 families were displaced in Deir ez-Zor.⁴¹ The energy ministry said Turkey’s warning came too late.⁴² On 25 June 2026 Syria and Iraq signed a protocol on data exchange, including a proposal to revive the three-country technical committee with Turkey if all three approve.⁴³ Turkey still describes the rivers as transboundary under its sovereignty, while Syria and Iraq want them treated as international rivers.²⁹

The record

Shared river basins

Cooperation and conflict on the record, 1948 to 2008

The International Water Events Database scores every reported interaction between riparian states on the Basins at Risk scale, from formal war over water to voluntary unification. Cooperative and conflictive events add up to less than 100% because neutral events are counted too.

Source: Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database, International Water Events Database, Oregon State University, as compiled by the Transboundary Waters Atlas. The series ends in 2008; every later dispute and agreement is outside it and is covered in the text above.

The agreements

Source: Master Treaties Database of the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database (February 2023 edition), via the Transboundary Waters Atlas. Titles as recorded, with spelling normalised. Colonial-era boundary instruments appear because they fixed water rights on rivers that later became international.

Joint bodies

• Joint Syrio-Jordanian Commission (JSJC)Jordan · 1953 · Jordan, Syria
• Joint Technical Committee on Regional Waters (JTCW)Euphrates-Tigris · 1980 · Iraq, Syria, Turkey

Source: the river basin organisation database of the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database (2013). A joint body on paper is not evidence that it meets.

Shared aquifers

• Anti-Lebanon Mountain rangeLebanon · data moderate
• Basalt Aquifer System (South): Azraq-Dhuleil BasinJordan · data good
• Basalt Aquifer System (West): Yarmouk BasinJordan · data good
• Jezira Tertiary Limestone Aquifer SystemTurkey · data moderate
• Neogene Aquifer System (North-West): Upper and Lower FarsIraq · data moderate
• Upper JeziraIraq, Turkey · data limited

Source: IGRAC and UNESCO, Transboundary Aquifers of the World. Data reliability is IGRAC’s own assessment of the information behind each outline.

Before the war, several ministries shared water management through the Council of the General Commission for Water Resource Management.¹⁵ The Ministry of Irrigation managed water resources, controlled drilled wells and licensed new ones.¹⁵ The Ministry of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform handled farm use and modern irrigation. The Ministry of Housing and Construction supplied drinking water.¹⁵ In 2005 the Council of Ministers agreed to set up a national fund for modern irrigation.¹⁵

The new structure

Water now sits with the Ministry of Energy, which has a deputy minister for water and electricity affairs.¹¹ Governorate companies run supply, such as the General Company for Drinking Water and Sewerage in Idlib.⁹ Aid agencies, including World Vision and Oxfam, work with the ministry on repairing facilities and transmission networks.¹¹ In August 2026 the energy minister reviewed water and wastewater investment opportunities with the Saudi-Syrian Business Council.¹²

Paying for water

Irrigation charges have never reflected use. Under a 1999 prime ministerial decision, farmers pay a flat US$70 per hectare for permanent irrigation and US$12 for winter irrigation.¹⁵ Operating costs reach about US$110 per hectare for pumped schemes. There is no legal basis for volumetric pricing.¹⁵

Syria faces reconstruction and a drying climate at the same time. The conflict had already cut national water supply by 30–40%.⁴ Then the 2025 drought cut rainfall by nearly 70%.⁷ Under high emissions, the country would have more than twice as many days above 35 °C by the end of the century.⁸

The first tasks are practical: wells, pumps, power and pipes. Rehabilitated stations in Idlib now run with solar power.⁹ The harder task is farming. The pre-war boom drew aquifers down through wells that a 2005 licensing law never controlled.²⁰ Irrigation charges are still flat per hectare, which gives farmers no reason to save water.¹⁵ Upstream, Euphrates flows still depend on Turkey and the 1987 average of 500 m³/s.¹⁶