A cameleer checks his phone while sitting on his camel on the beach in Dubai. The Gulf countries have long been seen as islands of stability in the Middle East, but the war in the region has highlighted various risks. Photo / Fadel Senna, AFP
A cameleer checks his phone while sitting on his camel on the beach in Dubai. The Gulf countries have long been seen as islands of stability in the Middle East, but the war in the region has highlighted various risks. Photo / Fadel Senna, AFP
The Gulf states may have been built on wealth from oil, but it is another liquid – water – that keeps these desert countries running day-to-day.
Weekend attacks on desalination plants in countries on both sides of the Iran war have targeted the Gulf’s most precious commodity andthreatened to weaponise a resource needed to prevent the region’s megacities from collapsing.
Bahrain accused Iran of damaging a desalination plant, hours after the Iranians claimed a United States air strike had hit one of theirs.
Securing plentiful water in a region with almost no underground supplies or rain has been central to the vaulting ambitions of the fast-growing Gulf countries.
The solution has been desalination plants, which turn seawater into drinking water for millions of people in one of the world’s driest regions.
In Kuwait, about 90% of drinking water comes from desalination, with roughly 86% per cent in Oman and about 70% in Saudi Arabia.
Michael Christopher Low, director of the University of Utah’s Middle East centre, told AP News: “Everyone thinks of Saudi Arabia and their neighbours as petro-states. But I call them saltwater kingdoms.
“They’re human-made fossil-fuelled water superpowers. It’s both a monumental achievement of the 20th century and a certain kind of vulnerability.”
Nearly half the world’s total desalination capacity is in the Gulf.
The processing of water is needed not only to quench the thirst of fast-growing populations, but also for hotels, resorts, shopping centres, golf courses and other facilities.
Yet what has been a marvel of engineering and economic planning has also been recognised as the dangerous vulnerability it is.
Gulf governments and their allies have long warned of the risks these systems pose to regional stability.
In 2010, a CIA analysis said attacks on desalination facilities could quickly trigger national crises in several Gulf states. If critical equipment were destroyed, water processing could be halted for months.
A desalination plant in Saudi Arabia, which is reliant on such facilities for 70% of its drinking water. Photo / Getty Images
A leaked 2008 US diplomatic cable warned that Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s capital, “would have to evacuate within a week” if either the Jubail desalination plant on the Gulf coast, or its pipelines or associated power infrastructure were seriously damaged. The cable added that “the current structure of the Saudi government could not exist” without the plant.
Gulf states are thought to have bolstered the resilience of their desalination networks since then, but the weekend strikes have again highlighted their vulnerability.
The Iran war is not the first conflict in the region in which water-processing plants have been targeted.
After Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent Gulf War, Iraqi forces sabotaged power stations and desalination facilities as they retreated.
Low said that at the same time, millions of barrels of crude oil were deliberately released into the Gulf, creating one of the largest oil spills in history.
Workers deployed booms around the intake valves of desalination plants to prevent the vast slick from contaminating seawater-intake pipes.
The destruction left Kuwait largely without fresh water and dependent on emergency water imports. Full recovery took years.
More recently, Houthi rebels have targeted Saudi desalination facilities.
Abdullah Baabood, an Omani academic at Waseda University in Japan, told the New York Times: “In the Gulf, desalination facilities are not merely infrastructure. They are essential lifelines that supply drinking water to millions.
“Striking them risks turning a military confrontation into a direct threat to civilian survival.”
Iran, too, uses desalination and must deal with acute water shortages. Tehran claimed that a US air strike had damaged one of its water processing plants.
Abbas Araghchi, the Foreign Minister, said the strike on Qeshm Island, in the Strait of Hormuz, had affected the water supply for 30 villages.
He warned that in doing so, “the US set this precedent, not Iran”. The US military denied striking the facility.
Sascha Bruchmann, of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said he thought it was unlikely the Americans had targeted the desalination plant.
However, Qeshm was essential to Iranian plans to block the strait to shipping, and was probably being targeted for other strategic reasons – to hit underground stocks of drones and missiles, for example.
Bruchmann told the Telegraph: “The Americans would be pounding Qeshm Island to take out these underground facilities where the drones and the missiles basically embody the last strategic option, or one of the last strategic options, of Iran. So it would be a nice coincidence [for Iran] to create an information operation to say the Americans are targeting civilian assets.
“And it would justify the retaliatory attacks on desalination plants without looking like the bad guy.”
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