Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene December 2018 Vol.13 No.6 | Page 20
Conflict Resolution
Water wars won’t be won on a battlefield
By Bill Frisk
I
t’s an astonishing finding: “Two countries engaged
in active water cooperation” will “not go to war, for
any reason.” According to an extensive analysis by
global issues think tank Strategic Foresight Group, it was
found in examining 146 countries that share rivers, lakes
and other freshwater resources, that “countries enjoying
peaceful co-existence have active water cooperation
and countries facing risk of war have low or no water
cooperation.”
In fact, water is a popular target for terrorists. According
to a U.S. Homeland Security report, between 2013 and
2015, ISIS alone launched nearly 20 major attacks against
Syrian and Iraqi water infrastructure. When ISIS seized
the Fallujah Dam, it gained dangerous leverage over local
governments and populations by cutting off water to
Christian, Kurdish, and Muslim minorities.
Bashar Assad reportedly bombed water sources around
Damascus to cut off water to 5.5 million people and the
Taliban has attacked dams in Afghanistan multiple times
and attempted to assassinate Afghanistan’s minister for
energy and water in 2009. When the Somali government
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Africa Water, Sanitation & Hygiene • December 2018
retook cities and ports, Al-Shabab cut off liberated
cities from water sources and destroyed water supplies.
Colombia’s FARC bombed an oil pipeline, polluting a
major river that resulted in 150,000 people losing water
in the country’s worst environmental disaster. In conflict-
ridden eastern Ukraine, water treatment workers in
Donetsk were regularly targeted as they struggled to keep
clean water flowing to its 345,000 residents.
And just to drive the point home: A group of retired
three- and four-star officers from across the U.S. military
issued this report, The Role of Water Stress in Instability
and Conflict, detailing the security threats that global water
scarcity could pose for the U.S. and allies in coming years.
In the next decade, some 2.9 billion people in 48 countries
will face water shortages. Currently, 2.1 billion people lack
access to safe drinking water at home, and six in 10 lack
safe sanitation globally.
On the anniversary of the launch of the first-ever U.S.
Global Water Strategy, we must actively engage water
security as a strategic path for U.S. foreign policy.
In November 2017, led by the Department of State and