As the Middle East braces for another year of extreme heat, climate change is turning the soil to dust in the landscape that has long been known as the fertile crescent — and water has become a new source of conflict.Alissa J. Rubin, who covers the Middle East, tells the story of Iraq’s water crisis and what it means for the world.Guest: Alissa J. Rubin, a senior Middle East correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: From 2023: A climate warning from the cradle of civilization.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Bryan Denton for The New York Times Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What does extreme heat mean for Baghdad?
So it's Saturday in Baghdad, and we're driving east and a little south. It's supposed to reach 121 degrees today, tomorrow, really for most of the next week. When I was doing this reporting in Iraq, we would leave sometimes at 5 a.m. before first light in order just to be able to bear the heat. Everything is dusty. And everyone's pretty tired of this level of heat.
As you drove out of Baghdad, there seemed to be no respite to the brownness of it. We're driving by large stands of dead palm trees with no leaves left, just the trunks standing up. And along the road, usually, you would see people herding sheep. You'd see quite a few animals. And what we began to see was carcasses of cows, bloated and covered with flies. And this wasn't just one or two cows.
Chapter 2: What are the signs of Iraq's environmental crisis?
I started to try to count them, but I stopped counting because there were too many. There was a feeling of something almost apocalyptic that was happening. What did you think when you were looking at this, Alyssa? I thought that this was what would happen at the end of the world.
From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. As the Middle East braces for another year of extreme heat, longtime war correspondent Alyssa Rubin goes to Iraq, one of the hottest places on Earth, and tells the story of a new source of conflict, water. Today, Iraq's water crisis and what it means for the world. It's Tuesday, May 6th. Alyssa, you are a war reporter.
You spent over two decades covering Iraq, starting with the U.S. invasion in 2003. You and I were there together. We reported on many crises in Iraq, the war over all of those years. I left and you stayed. And you've recently turned your attention to a different kind of crisis. Tell us about that reporting.
Well, as the wars wound down, there was something still deeply unsettling. And it wasn't just the aftermath of war. There were cities where people weren't leaving their homes during the day. Villages that were half empty or even villages where I saw people leaving. Animals abandoned by their owners and just left to die. And really overcrowded hospital emergency rooms in some places.
These are things I expect to see during a war. But this was about something else. It was actually about hotter temperatures and ultimately an increasing lack of water. It was making it impossible to have a kind of civilized, normal life. And yet it seemed like almost no one was talking about it.
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Chapter 3: How has the water crisis changed Iraq's landscape?
So it became very clear to you that water should be your focus, that water was going to be the big problem going forward.
Yes, and that that across the Middle East was going to be the big problem. And it has to do with the changing climate. We can see in the last couple of years, in 2023 and 2024, there were record temperatures around the world. But in the Middle East, it's getting hot faster, about almost twice as fast as other parts of the world. Wow, twice as fast. Yes.
Chapter 4: What is the significance of the Fertile Crescent?
And if you think about it for a moment, that means water's evaporating more quickly in any place, any lake, any river, any irrigation canal. And this is true in many places, but it was just so stark in the Middle East. And what really struck me is that this used to be a place called the Fertile Crescent.
It was Mesopotamia, the land between two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, two of the rivers that many, many people have heard of. from their history books, from reading the Bible, from reading all kinds of mythology, and it had changed profoundly.
So I wanted to see what it would mean for the people who were living at the edge of these changes, where it was most severe, and what it meant for them and their families, but more than that, for the region as a whole. What does it mean when a country doesn't have enough water? So where did you go to answer that question?
Well, along with my translator, Ahmed Salah, I went to the edge of Diyala province, which is known as the fruit basket of Iraq, or it used to be. Good morning. And that's where I met a man named Hashim Kanani and some members of his family. And they had farmed there for generations.
It was beautiful, all the trees of apricot and figs. The grandparents, they used to sit here in the afternoon, see the kids playing, the woman going to the canal. The water was pure.
The red.
They grew vegetables for his family. We had about 1,500 cattle. And they grew the fodder for the cows and the sheep and the goats. We had buffaloes before. You had buffaloes?
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Chapter 5: How are farmers coping with drought conditions?
Yeah.
Because they need a lot of water, don't they?
Yes, correct.
And his family made a good living off farming. They were modest farmers, but surrounded by other farmers.
Yeah, we used to fish here. We used to fish here. We used not to go to the market at all.
The water from the Diyala River, which fed these irrigation canals that crisscrossed his land, that was a big part of his life. Before, we used to drink from the canal. And all through his childhood, this had been a place of bounty, of plenty for him.
The change in the temperature happened when the desertification has started. And then he told me he started to notice a change about 15 years ago.
The water has become less like the rain. The rains that usually arrived in the winter stopped coming or were very meager. It affected the cultivation.
So the plants got damaged.
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Chapter 6: What happens when families can no longer farm?
He showed me his corn. He wanted me to actually feel the kernels so that I would understand how much effect the years of drought and heat had had on his crops.
This is not totally dry, now recently dried out.
And it was shriveled and withered.
Okra, yes.
And the okra, which was another big crop of his, was shrunken and the leaves were all brown.
And even if the water touches the skin, it would affect the skin.
And the irrigation canal was now really, it was shallow and brown. It had a kind of a green algae lying on top of it.
This is sewage water, so no way we can wash.
It's nothing but sewage water, he said. You can't feed it to animals even. You can't water your crops with it. Even the fish that was in it died. And that meant they couldn't grow enough grain to feed the cows or the grass didn't really come up for the sheep because there just wasn't enough water.
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Chapter 7: What future do farmers see for their children?
So they literally disassemble their houses.
Chapter 8: How are families adapting to climate change in Iraq?
They disassemble their house. So you come to villages which look as if they had been bombed, Sabrina. Wow. People did this themselves. I saw people loading up a pickup truck with basically everything they had. Wow. everything will be gone. It's this sort of deconstruction of a life, of a way of life right in front of you.
What's an example of a place emptying out like that, of people moving?
Well, I went to a village that, well, it used to be a village that had been quite agricultural at one time, apparently, which was hard to believe because what had happened there was that the desert had begun to encroach. And the way it works is that literally sand begins to blow and it begins to blow over the roads. And then gradually, it actually is like snow. It covers the buildings. Mm-hmm.
And we drove sort of through this more and more sand. And there wasn't a big sandstorm that day. This was just happening anyway because there were no plants anymore because of the heat and the drought to hold the earth. And this was a little community that had had at one time 5,000 people, but there were only 80 people left.
So the village was literally disappearing from the map, in a way. The people were leaving it, and it was turning into dust. Yes.
And I wondered, where do people go? And what is it like for them when they get to wherever they're going? Is it really any better? Or are the problems just different ones?
We'll be right back. So the land is drying up. Farming is becoming untenable as a way of life. And people are fleeing their villages. You set out to see where they were going. Tell me about that.
Well, my expectation had been that people might go far away. But in fact, what I found is that first people's instinct is to stay close to home. They move a few miles to a place where they think there might be either more water and they could do a little farming if they're farmers or where they think they'll be able to get jobs.
But where they tend to end up is on the periphery of, in Iraq's case, its largest two cities, Baghdad and Basra. And around the periphery of those cities, what's developed are very, quite large, sprawling, informal settlements that are not officially part of the city. So they're kind of the worst of both worlds. The streets are not paved. The houses are makeshift, sometimes patched together.
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