The Mail

Mosul’s Other Crisis

Thank you for Dexter Filkins’s recent article about the grave risk that the Mosul Dam poses to Iraq (“Before the Flood,” January 2nd). Large dams, relying on shaky science (or ignoring good science), have for decades devoured development funds while creating more problems than they’ve solved. Dams are often built under authoritarian regimes, exacerbating political instability while destroying many citizens’ lives and livelihoods. History has shown that dams are too costly a method of generating electricity, and this is particularly true in Iraq, which has vast and unexploited solar potential. Factoring in the ninety-seven-per-cent average cost overrun for large dams, a new structure downstream from the Mosul Dam could cost around four billion dollars. Dams are also a foolhardy investment: in our changing climate, desert reservoirs are drying up. More than twenty per cent of the Tigris River’s precious freshwater is evaporating from its reservoirs, leaving behind saline-irrigation water that’s slowly poisoning the adjacent land. The Mosul Dam, the project of a dictator’s hubris, is a literal and metaphorical sinkhole—for the dreams of a nation and for funds that could be better used elsewhere. Pouring more money, and more concrete, into this ill-conceived behemoth, or into other dams, will only delay the inevitable. But there is a possible solution for Iraq: to decommission this dam. We can only hope that it does so before it’s too late and the precarious region is plunged further into chaos.