The River that joins with the Biblical Euphrates River, the Shatt al Arab River, is now polluted, and has become an environmental and economical disaster.
The once beautiful river, The Shatt al Arab, the river that flows from the biblical site of the Garden of Eden to the Persian Gulf, has turned into an environmental and economic disaster that Iraq’s newly democratic government is almost powerless to fix tthe NYT is reporting.
The environment problem became particularly acute last year when Iran cut the flow entirely from the Karun River, which meets the Shatt south of Basra, for 10 months. The flow resumed after the winter rains, but at a fraction of earlier levels.
In the 1980s Iran and Iraq fought over the Shatt al Arab, which forms the southernmost border between the countries and is still littered with the rusting hulks of sunken ships from that war. Now, despite improved relations after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the river has once again become a source of diplomatic tension.
“The water is from God,” said Mohammed Sadoon, a farmer and fisherman in the village of Abu Khasib, who sold two water buffaloes last year because he could no longer provide them with potable water from the Shatt. “They shouldn’t seize it from us.”
Iraq’s minister of water resources, Abdul Latif Jamal Rashid, said that the environmental problems and the disputes over water rights were a lingering legacy of dictatorship.
Mr. Hussein diverted the southerly flow of water into a trench during the war with Iran and drained the marshlands of southern Iraq in the 1990s. His belligerence toward Iraq’s neighbors also left the country isolated — and then weakened — when those countries built their dams, siphoning off what for millenniums flowed through Mesopotamia, the land of the two rivers. Read More
Here’s some history of the Shatt al Arab River:
The Shatt al Arab River is formed by the confluence, or coming together with the Euphrates River. The largest river in Southwest Asia, it rises in Turkey and flows southeast across Syria and through Iraq. Formed by the confluence of the Karasu and the Murat rivers in the high Armenian plateau, the Euphrates descends between major ranges of the Taurus Mountains to the Syrian plateau. It then flows through western and central Iraq to unite with the Tigris and continues, as Shatt al-Arab, to the Persian Gulf. In all, it is 1,740 mi (2,800 km) long. Its valley was heavily irrigated in ancient times, and many great cities, some of whose ruins remain, lined its banks. With the Tigris, it defines an area known historically as Mesopotamia. Source
Biblical prophecy in being fulfilled in giant leaps it seems today with natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes and volcanoes erupting around the world. With increased solar activity expected to create more havoc and devastation, we can look forward to more of the same as we have already seen only with greater intensity and acceleration upon the earth and the environment we live in. Everywhere you turn, from man made destruction of the earth and God’s creation for greed, such as the horrific disaster in the Gulf of Mexico where it is now being reported that the ocean floor is cracked, there is destruction.
The phenonena occuring today upon the earth reads like something out of Revelation 16.
No place on earth and no one is exempt. The human race and its thirst for greed is destroying God’s earth and His creation and God is going to shake the very foundations of the earth to get our attention and our only place of safety is in knowing the Lord Jesus Christ and His forgiveness.
Related Story: Euphrates and Tigris Rivers Drying Up As Plagues of Snakes Released
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