Attacks by Turkey leave more than 1 million people in Syria without water

Between October 2019 and January 2024, more than 100 attacks by Turkish air forces reportedly took place on oil fields, gas facilities and power stations in the Kurdish-held Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES).

These attacks have added to the humanitarian crisis in a region reeling from a years-long civil war and four years of extreme drought exacerbated by climate change. Ensuring water supplies had already been a challenge in the region, but attacks on electricity infrastructure in October last year interrupted the power supply to the region’s main water station in Alouk, which has been out of order since then.

A situation report prepared by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) further documents the disruption caused to civilian life by Turkish airstrikes in northern Syria. UNOCHA estimates that fuel, electricity and water supplies have been disrupted in a total of 11 towns and 2,750 villages, affecting more than 1 million people and underlines that systematic attacks on basic services have worsened the region’s humanitarian crisis.

On 24 November last year, the UN Security Council was briefed on the humanitarian situation in Syria by UNOCHA, on behalf of Mr. Tom Fletcher, the UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief. UNOCHA urged interventions in the health, water, education and energy sectors, all of which have been strongly undermined by years of conflict and crisis. More than five million people, most of them displaced, live in areas outside government control in Syria's north and northwest, the UN says, and many rely on aid to survive. A lack of international funding has severely undercut the provision of basic services such as water, waste disposal and sanitation in displacement camps in northwest Syria, according to the United Nations.

A new BBC investigation provides arguments to the effect that Turkey’s attacks on the region are a “severe violation of international law”. The need to strengthen the protection of water infrastructure during armed conflicts emerged during a roundtable in 2016 convened by the Geneva Water Hub to feed the work of the Global High-Level Panel on Water and Peace. Led by the Geneva Water Hub, a broad consultative group of university research centres, UN agencies and (international) Non-Governmental Organisations took the initiative to draft ‘The Geneva List of Principles on the Protection of Water Infrastructure’.

This document, published in 2019, aims to systematise the rules applicable to the protection of water and water-related infrastructure, and incorporates good practices of States and other actors. The list addresses both international and non-international armed conflicts and makes further recommendations to improve the protection of water infrastructure. Principle 3 of the Geneva List of Principles states that: “Everyone has the right to water and sanitation, which is essential for the full enjoyment of all human rights”. Principle 4 states that parties to a conflict should refrain from using water infrastructure and water-related infrastructure as a means of warfare. Principle 6 states that water infrastructure and water-related infrastructure are presumed to be civilian objects and, in such case, must not be attacked. 

Furthermore, Principle 15 relates to causing significant damage to the environment : “Water infrastructure and water-related infrastructure should not be made the object of attack, even when these are military objectives, if such attack is intended, or may be expected, to cause significant damage to the environment”. Organisation such as Pax have studied and documented the environmental effects of conflict in Syria.