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Visual stories

Water, told visually

Long-form stories about the rivers, aquifers and coasts that shape water in the Middle East and North Africa. Each is reported from public sources and built around its own maps and data.

Amman spreading across its hills
Utilities · Non-revenue water

The Leak Hunters

Between a third and half of the water pumped into the region’s city networks never reaches a paying customer. It is the cheapest new supply anyone can buy. How utilities hunt it down, and why it stays lost anyway.

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A Moroccan ridge above a sea of low cloud
Morocco & Oman · Fog harvesting

The Nets That Catch Clouds

On a ridge above Sidi Ifni, 1,686 square metres of mesh takes drinking water out of the air for sixteen villages. The narrow set of places where that actually works is the rest of the story.

The industrial shoreline of Ras Laffan, Qatar
The Gulf · Desalination & conflict

Four Days of Water

About 40 per cent of the world’s desalinated water is made around one narrow, contested sea. In 2026 the plants were struck from the air, on both shores, and the question stopped being hypothetical.

Salt formations on the shore of the Dead Sea
Dead Sea · Jordan, Israel & Palestine

The Sea That Is Leaving

The Dead Sea is dropping about a metre a year and taking its shoreline with it. More than 6,000 sinkholes, a river spent before it arrives, and a rescue canal that was never built.

Circular irrigation fields in the Saudi desert from orbit
Saudi Arabia · Fossil groundwater & food

Circles in the Sand

Saudi Arabia grew wheat in the desert with ice-age water and became a wheat exporter, then stopped and went looking for someone else’s water.

Ancient agricultural terraces in the Haraz Mountains
Yemen · Groundwater collapse

The Slow Death of Water

Yemen was once the best in the world at farming a dry country. Then it learned to drill, and Sanaa started racing its own water table downwards.

A falaj channel beside date palms in Oman
Iran, Oman & Morocco · Qanats and aflaj

The Underground Rivers

Tunnels three thousand years old move water across deserts without a pump. The time-share law that governs them still works. The borehole drilled beside them can kill one in a decade.

Reed beds in the Mesopotamian marshes near Nasiriyah
Iraq, Türkiye & Syria · The Tigris and Euphrates

The Land Between the Rivers

The rivers that invented irrigation now reach Iraq with less water and more salt. Upstream dams, a marsh drained and half-restored, and a basin shared without a treaty.

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