Turkey has increased by more than 50 percent the flow of the Euphrates river to Iraq, the Iraqi water resources ministry said on Sunday, in a timely boost for agriculture.
"Turkey increased the flow of the Euphrates today to 570 cubic metres (20,000 cubic feet) a second (m3/s) and we hope that our Turkish neighbours continue to increase water levels to guarantee irrigation for our agriculture," the ministry said.
At the start of the month, the ministry said 500 m3/s was the minimum flow needed to cover half of Iraq's irrigation requirements.
On June 18, Turkey pledged to double the flow of water into the Euphrates over the summer by opening dam floodgates, according to Tareq al-Hashemi, one of Iraq's vice presidents.
He said at the time that Ankara had promised to increase water flow to Iraq from 360 m3/s to 515, and would ramp that figure up to 715 m3/s during July, August and September.
In recent months, Iraq has repeatedly asked Turkey to increase the flow in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, as a chronic shortage of water for irrigation threatens this year's harvest.
Baghdad says Turkey's construction of a series of dams on the rivers' higher reaches has sharply reduced the flow and compounded the problems caused by a nearly decade-long drought.
The flow of the Euphrates, which runs through Syria before reaching Iraq, is now running at just over half its 2000 level of 950 m3/second.
The controversy over the sharing of the mighty rivers at the root of Iraq's ancient name of Mesopotamia — meaning "between the rivers" in Greek — is almost as old as the country itself.
But the current dispute comes at an especially sensitive time when war-devastated Iraq is keen to rekindle diplomatic relations with its more powerful neighbours.
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