A Kurdish farmer digs irrigation ditches for water supplied from a well, at a farm in the Rania district near the Dukan dam northwest of Iraq's northeastern city of Sulaimaniyah on July 2, 2022. Photo: AFP

Farmers in Iraqi Kurdistan seeking to irrigate crops face seeing their economic lifeline slip away as the waters of Lake Dukan recede and dams upstream in Iran stem the flow.

Bapir Kalkani, who is also a trade unionist, farms near the picturesque lake but has seen marked changes over the past three years as Iraq suffers prolonged drought.

"There was water where I'm standing now" in 2019, the 56-year-old said. "It used to go three kilometers further, but the level has retreated."

Sesame and beans are being grown on the plain under a blazing sun, adjacent to the lake which is fed by a Tigris tributary, the Lower Zab river which has its source in Iran.

The large artificial lake was created in the 1950s following construction of the Dukan dam, to supply irrigation and drinking water for the region, as well as to generate electricity.

But for several years both the lake and the river have been shrinking - as have all of the rivers in Iraq.

The country is classified as one of the five nations most vulnerable to the effects of climate change and desertification. Its water reserves have fallen by 60 percent compared with 2021, the government says.

Rainfall becoming rare

With rainfall becoming a rarity and after three successive years of drought, Iraq has been forced to halve the area it devotes to agriculture.

"If we hadn't had a little rain in late spring, there would have been no crops in Kurdistan this year," Kalkani said.

Farmers in the area used to dig shallow wells fed by the Dukan so they could irrigate their crops. But not any more.

"The wells have lost 70 percent of their water," he said.

Sesame farmer Shirko Aziz Ahmed had to dig a well several meters deep so he could access water and raise it using a diesel-powered pump.

"Sesame needs a lot of watering, so I'm going to have to dig even deeper as the water level goes down," he said.

Drought is not the only source of the farmer's water problems.

Iran has built several dams on the Lower Zab, notably the Kolsa barrage.

"The Kolsa dam has caused at least an 80 percent drop in the water levels" of the Lower Zab, said Banafsheh Keynoush of the Washington-based Middle East Institute.

She said Iran is going through one of the worst droughts in its history and has had to revise its irrigation policy.

"Iran is on a dam-building spree, and many of its dams are small," she told the media.

The Dukan dam in Iraq has also been badly affected by the reduced river flow, said its director Kochar Jamal Tawfeeq. "Now we have only 41 percent, below half of the capacity" of the dam, he said.

It supplies drinking water for "about 3 million people in Sulaymaniyah and Kirkuk," two major cities downstream, he said.

But at just 300 millimeters of rainfall in 2021 - half the previous annual average - the skies have not been generous. And Tawfeeq said 2022 is on track to mirror last 2021's figures.

"We are releasing 90 cubic meters per second," the director said. "When the reservoir is full, we release 200 to 250."

Tawfeeq said farmers were being told "not to grow crops that need too much water."