Water Conflict, Cooperation & Diplomacy

Almost every major water source in this region crosses a border on its way to the tap. The Nile basin stretches over eleven countries and sustains more than half a billion people.³ The Euphrates has three riparian states, Turkey, Syria and Iraq, though its basin reaches into Saudi Arabia and Jordan as well.⁸ The great aquifers ignore lines on maps entirely. That geography guarantees friction.

It has also produced more cooperation than the headlines suggest, and very unevenly. Worldwide there are more than 3,600 treaties on the use of transboundary surface waters, against one shared aquifer with a comprehensive management regime and two more with rudimentary consultative arrangements.²³ Rivers get law. Groundwater, which is where this region keeps most of its water, mostly does not.

The legal scaffolding on the two great shared rivers is thin and old. A protocol signed on 17 July 1987 obliges Turkey to pass a yearly average of more than 500 cubic metres a second to Syria, about 16 billion cubic metres a year, and says so only until a final allocation is agreed between the three riparians.⁷⁸¹¹ That was 39 years ago. The 1959 agreement between the United Arab Republic and Sudan, which divided 22 billion cubic metres of net benefit at Aswan and left Egypt with 55.5 and Sudan with 18.5 billion a year, is still the operative Nile allocation text for the two downstream states.²

The gap between the paper and the river is measurable. Euphrates flow at the Syrian border averaged about 30 billion cubic metres a year before the dams, 25.1 billion from 1974 to 1998 and 22.8 billion from 1990 to 2010.⁸ Against the 1987 entitlement of 500 cubic metres a second, actual flow has been put at around 200.¹⁰ The academic frame for reading these asymmetries is hydro-hegemony, the study of how power rather than law allocates shared rivers, and it was built largely on this region’s cases.¹

The live files, basin by basin. On the Nile, Ethiopia’s GERD holds 74 billion cubic metres, filled in five stages from July 2020, and was inaugurated on 9 September 2025 as a US$5 billion project generating more than 5,000 megawatts.⁶⁵ Egypt and Sudan want a binding operating agreement and Ethiopia offers guidelines; the 2015 Declaration of Principles, signed in Khartoum on 23 March 2015, sets out eight principles and no numbers.⁴

The basin’s institutional map moved in 2024, which is often missed. The Nile Basin Cooperative Framework Agreement entered into force on 13 October 2024, after ratification by Burundi, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda and accession by South Sudan, and it paves the way for a Nile River Basin Commission. Egypt and Sudan are not parties.³

On the Tigris and Euphrates, the asymmetry is physical before it is political. Turkey generates about 89% of total Euphrates flow from 28% of the basin area, while Syria contributes 11% from 22% of it and Iraq holds 47% of the basin area.⁸ More than 60 main dams give the basin a maximum storage capacity of 144 billion cubic metres, roughly six times its mean annual flow, and agriculture takes more than 70% of what is used.⁸ On the Tigris, Iraq holds 56% of the basin area, Turkey 24.5% and Iran 19%, and the mean annual flow is 20 billion cubic metres at Mosul and 25.7 billion at Kut.⁹ Upstream damming cut the Mesopotamian marshes to 14% of their original size, though more than half has since been rehabilitated.⁹

In the Jordan basin, the 1994 treaty sets out the allocations in detail: Israel pumps 12 million cubic metres from the Yarmouk in summer and 13 in winter with Jordan taking the rest, Jordan concedes 20 million more in winter against 20 million from the Jordan River in summer, and Jordan is entitled to 10 million cubic metres of desalinated water from saline springs.¹⁹ Oslo II, Article 40, governs the Israeli and Palestinian file: it recognises Palestinian water rights in the West Bank and defers them to permanent status talks, estimates future Palestinian needs at 70 to 80 million cubic metres a year, and commits 28.6 million a year in the interim.²⁰

Principal instruments, with the dates each text actually carries. Statuses summarised.

One scheme in this sector, examined in full: what was built, what it cost, what worked and what did not.

Two global conventions set the default rules, and the region is only partly inside them. The 1997 UN Watercourses Convention was adopted on 21 May 1997 and entered into force on 17 August 2014, with 43 parties.²⁵ The regional parties are Syria and Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Qatar, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco and the State of Palestine, joining between 1998 and 2015; Yemen signed in 2000 without ratifying, and Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Iran and the Gulf states other than Qatar are not on the list.²⁵

The 1992 UNECE Water Convention, adopted at Helsinki on 17 March 1992 and in force since 6 October 1996, now has 60 parties well beyond Europe. Iraq acceded on 24 March 2023 and is the only Middle Eastern state on the list, which matters because the convention carries procedural duties a downstream state can actually invoke.²⁶

In conflict, the governing text is Article 54 of Additional Protocol I of 1977. It prohibits starvation of civilians as a method of warfare and names drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works among the objects that may not be attacked, destroyed or removed. Two qualifiers matter in practice: the prohibition in paragraph 2 carries a purpose element, attacking them for the specific purpose of denying their sustenance value, and paragraph 5 allows a party to derogate on its own territory where required by imperative military necessity.²⁷ Reprisals against such objects are barred outright.²⁷

The soft-law instrument most often invoked after an attack on water infrastructure is the Geneva List of Principles on the Protection of Water Infrastructure, the result of a process the Geneva Water Hub’s Platform for International Water Law began in 2016, following the global panel report A Matter of Survival.²⁸

How water diplomacy actually works here, and where each mechanism breaks.

Volumes are traded for other things

Water is rarely negotiated on its own. It is traded against energy, recognition or transit. On 22 November 2021 Jordan, Israel and the UAE signed a declaration pairing 600 MW of Jordanian solar generation for Israel with Israeli desalinated water for Jordan, up to 200 million cubic metres a year.²¹

The clearest current example is Iraq and Turkey. Their framework agreement for cooperation in the water field was signed in April 2024, and its financing mechanism followed in November 2025, with Turkey agreeing to release a billion cubic metres and Iraq retaining 65% of the gains above the prevailing reference price on barrels resold into Europe.¹¹¹³ It is a financing mechanism rather than oil for water, and Turkey has urged Iraq to cut losses from leakage, unlined canals and illegal tapping, which makes downstream efficiency a negotiating asset rather than only a domestic saving.¹²

Technical committees outlast political freezes, when they meet

Data sharing is diplomacy’s lowest gear and its most durable. The Disi agreement gives its technical committee regular meetings every six months, supervising joint monitoring and common drilling standards.²² The Nubian Sandstone states have a joint authority, constituted in 1992, joined by Sudan in 1996 and Chad in 1999, with monitoring and information-exchange instruments from October 2000 and a regional action programme signed on 18 September 2013.²⁴ Neither allocates water.

The counter-case is Oslo II, Article 40, in force since 1995. Its joint water committee decides by consensus and its interim allocations have never been updated, and its present activity is not publicly documented, which is its own answer.²⁰

Infrastructure re-prices every claim downstream

A dam or a desalination plant changes what each party needs from the table. Ethiopia filled a 74 billion cubic metre reservoir from 2020 without a binding accord, and permanently changed the Nile’s politics without the war repeatedly predicted.⁶⁵

Desalination cuts the other way. A coastal state that can manufacture water needs less from a shared river, which lowers the temperature of a negotiation and also lowers its urgency.

Droughts are the stress test, and instruments fail differently

Most basin crises ignite in dry years and settle in wet ones. In May 2025 Iraq entered summer with about 10 billion cubic metres in storage against the 18 billion its ministry said the season needed, the lowest reserve in 80 years.¹⁶ By the start of the following winter it held 5 billion, the lowest since 1933, and after an abundant spring it reached 34 billion by mid-2026, still under half the 60 billion held in 2021.¹⁷¹⁸

The instrument matters as much as the deal. The second Iraq and Turkey memorandum, signed in November 2025, sat unapproved by the Iraqi cabinet while a caretaker government was confined to daily affairs.¹³

Nobody is notified

The failure that recurs is procedural. In May and June 2026 a release from the Atatürk Dam, the first in seven years and only the third in 22, flooded eastern Syria and western Iraq: more than sixty water pumping stations were disabled, three bridges in Anbar and the Sa’da water project went out of service, and Iraqi authorities learned of the release after the fact.¹¹

Neither the 1987 nor the 1990 protocol provides for real-time notification of dam releases, binding dispute resolution or climate adaptation, which is why the same basin can fail by drought in one year and by flood in the next.¹¹ Iraq and Syria signed a bilateral technical protocol in Baghdad on 25 June 2026 to exchange Euphrates flow information and pressed to revive the tripartite committee with Turkey.¹⁴¹⁵

Flashpoints and precedents:

Sources: Al Jazeera on the GERD inauguration⁵; the Arab Gulf States Institute on the Iraq and Turkey framework¹³; and for the March 2026 strikes, see the section below, where each claim is attributed to the party that made it.

Water infrastructure was long treated as off-limits in the Gulf, on the argument that everyone on every shore drinks the same sea. That assumption did not survive 2026, and the reason the exposure is systemic is arithmetic: nearly 44% of global desalination capacity sits in the Gulf Cooperation Council market, and desalinated water supplies most daily needs in Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Saudi Arabia.²⁹

What happened in March 2026 is best stated as the parties stated it. On 7 March Iran’s foreign minister said a United States attack had struck a desalination plant on Qeshm Island, disrupting supply to 30 villages; the United States and Israel denied it, and independent verification remains limited.³⁰³¹²⁹ On 8 March Bahrain accused Iran of indiscriminately attacking civilian targets and damaging one of its desalination plants.³¹ On 30 March Kuwait’s Ministry of Electricity reported an attack on a service building at a power and desalination plant that killed an Indian worker, while national water and power supply stayed stable.³² Damage in each case was limited, and the precedent is not.

In Gaza the same question is not about precedent but about scale. Water production had fallen to around 40% of its level before October 2023 by mid-2026, with independent well production at less than a third, and the municipal utility estimated that more than 80% of water infrastructure was damaged, destroyed or unreachable after more than two and a half years without grid electricity.³³ Humanitarian agencies could barely get six litres a day to everyone who needed it, against a UN emergency minimum of 15 to 20 litres and a survival baseline of 7.5.³³³⁴ About three-quarters of the population still depended on trucked water at the end of July 2026, with partners delivering more than 20,000 cubic metres a day, and on 24 August 2026 a newly built desalination plant in Sheikh Radwan was bombed.³⁵

The bodies that commission, regulate or deliver in this sector, and the names that recur across its tenders.

• Arab Water CouncilRegional body · Regional
• UN-ESCWARegional body · Regional
• Ministry of Water ResourcesMinistry · Syria
• Ministry of Water & Irrigation (MWI)Ministry · Jordan

Mandates, procurement routes and the rest of the region’s institutions are in the decision-maker directory.

Expect more hydraulic infrastructure than treaties in the near term. Diplomacy will accordingly stay seasonal and transactional, and the 1987 protocol will probably pass its fortieth year still described as interim.¹¹

The near-term test is whether a wet year gets banked or spent. Iraq’s ministry expected to use about 40% of the recovered 34 billion cubic metres before the following winter, which is what living without an allocation agreement looks like in practice.¹⁸ The stabilising forces are the unglamorous ones: measurement everyone accepts, technical channels that stay open in bad years, procedural rules on notification of the kind Iraq acquired by acceding to the 1992 convention²⁶, and the slow spread of the idea that desalination and reuse make absolute scarcity negotiable even where allocation is not.

Standing references for this sector. Every one is a real work and every link was checked.

• Pacific Institute, Water Conflict Chronology. The standing catalogue of water-related violence, and the dataset behind the claim that such incidents are rising. pacinst.org
• Geneva Water Hub, Geneva List of Principles on the Protection of Water Infrastructure. The reference text after desalination plants were struck in 2026. genevawaterhub.org
• Transboundary Waters Atlas, the basin-by-basin record of shared waters and the agreements covering them. transboundarywatersatlas.org