Water levels in the Euphrates River in eastern Syria began receding on Sunday, authorities said, after flooding affected thousands of people and raised questions about the management of the area.
The highly tribal east constitutes Syria’s breadbasket, accounting also for a significant part of its oil and gas production. It is crucial for a possible recovery from the 2011 to 2024 civil war. The flooding, mainly in Raqqa and Deir Ezzor governorates, occurred during the wheat harvest, a week after demonstrations broke out in the area to protest lack of public services and government support.
An emergency response committee for Deir Ezzor said the river will start retreating by Sunday evening. State news agency Sana said its level in Raqqa dropped by 60cm overnight. An irrigation official said that water discharge from the main Tabaqa dam and a nearby, auxiliary dam has dropped, “meaning that the flooding will be going down over the next several days”. The government has not provided overall data on how much the water level had risen.
The flooding started last week after Syria’s upstream neighbour Turkey discharged water from Ataturk Dam, one of the country's largest, because of a heavy rain season, according to Syrian officials. This forced Syrian authorities to discharge water from Syria's main Tabaqa dam, flooding a 300km stretch eastward to the border with Iraq.
Several children drowned and hundreds of families fled to outlying areas. Homes and farms were damaged and dozens of water stations went out of service. Central authorities sent the military and emergency response teams to help people cope.
Residents said the hardest hit were inhabitants of small peninsulas and those who had illegally built dwellings and businesses on the river's banks. An agricultural engineer working in the private sector in the east said that Turkey usually informs Syria well in advance before discharging water from its dams. “This is the protocol,” the engineer said, adding that it was not clear if the Syrian side had received ample warning or whether it did not act on it.
Syria's Energy Ministry said water discharge from Turkey has been “significant and unprecedented”, attributing it to “the abundance of the current rainy season and the opening of floodgates at dams located along the river in Turkish territory”. Turkish media said there have been “controlled water releases” from the Ataturk Dam.
In the last decade before Syria's civil war, the east suffered from a lack of rain and from hundreds of thousands of illegal water wells that destroyed its water reservoirs. Dwindling water supplies forced one million people to flee the area to the outskirts of Damascus and other urban centres to the west.
On Friday, President Ahmad Al Shara visited Deir Ezzor to check on conditions in the area. Eastern tribes have been a main component of auxiliary forces employed by the new order to consolidate power since the overthrow of the regime of former president Bashar Al Assad in December 2024.
However, demonstrations broke out in Deir Ezzor and Raqqa in the middle of this month to protest living conditions and poor services, as well as perceived low prices paid by the government for the wheat crop.
The protests coincided with disparaging remarks by Hussein Al Shara, Mr Al Shara’s father, about inhabitants of parts of Deir Ezzor. The President later apologised for what he described as an offence committed by his father against the people of the area.
