As I have mentioned before, almost 2,000 years ago, the Apostle John wrote
in the Book of Revelation that the day would arrive when the Euphrates River
would dry up, in order to make a way for the Kings of the East to gather for
the Battle of Armageddon.

I have shared news articles with you before which verify that this will
indeed happen, sometime in the future.

While the following article discusses the Shatt al-Arab, which is the river
that forms at the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers, and
then flows into the Persian Gulf, it also mentiones how the water level and
flow of these three rivers is not only affected by drought, but also by dams
which are built by Turkey, Syria and Iran. In fact, now a new problem is
affecting the Shatt al-Arab: the salty waters of the Persian Gulf are
beginning to backflow into the Shatt al-Arab.

So, as I have said before, taking all of these factors into consideration,
it is very easy to see how the Euphrates River could indeed totally dry up
one of these days, either as a result of a prolonged drought, and/or because
these other countries decide to keep all of the water to themselves.

God's Word will be fulfilled to the letter!


Vital River Is Withering, and Iraq Has No Answer

By STEVEN LEE MYERS - NYT

June 12, 2010


SIBA, Iraq -- 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.

Withered by decades of dictatorial mismanagement and then neglect, by
drought and the thirst of Iraq's neighbors, the river formed by the
convergence of the Tigris and the Euphrates no longer has the strength the
keep the sea at bay.

The salt water of the gulf now pushes up the Faw peninsula. Last year, for
the first time in memory, it extended beyond Basra, Iraq's biggest port
city, and even Qurna, where the two rivers meet. It has ravaged fresh-water
fisheries, livestock, crops and groves of date palms that once made the area
famous, forcing the migration of tens of thousands of farmers.

In a land of hardship and resignation and deep faith, the disaster along the
Shatt al Arab appears to some as the work of a higher power. "We can't
control what God does," said Rashid Thajil Mutashar, the deputy director of
water resources in Basra.

But man has had a hand in the river's decline. Turkey, Syria and Iran have
all harnessed the headwaters that flow into the Tigris and Euphrates and
ultimately into the Shatt al Arab, leaving Iraqi officials with little to do
but plead for them to release more from their modern networks of dams.

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.

"Iraq was in a position neither to reject nor to cooperate with them," he
said in an interview in his office in Baghdad. "They did what they wanted to
do."

In Basra and in the villages that cling to the Iraqi shore of the Shatt, the
impact of the disaster has been profound. The fresh waters that once flushed
the canals of Basra -- the Venice of the Middle East, it was called, though
long ago -- are fetid and filled with garbage.

The encroaching salt has so polluted supplies of drinking water that the
government has scrambled to dig canals from the north that bypass the Shatt
-- Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki inaugurated one ahead of this year's
national election -- and to truck in fresh water to much of the region.
Anyone who can afford it avoids tap water, which is salty enough to leave
spots on a glass when it dries.

Mr. Mutashar said that Iraq's acceptable level of salt in the Shatt's fresh
water was 1,500 parts per million; last year the level reached 12,000.

Faris Jassim al-Imara, a chemist at the University of Basra's Marine Science
Center, said he had recorded levels as high as 40,000 parts per million, as
well as heavy metals and other pollutants flowing from the north and from
Iran's oil refinery at Abadan, where enormous pipes steadily discharge waste
water.

"It's killing the river and the people," he said. Here in Siba, across the
river from Abadan, the salt water is slowly destroying agriculture, the
primary source of income other than oil.

Jalal Fakhir, who with his brothers farms a plot of land that has been in
his family for decades, lost his grape vines, five apricot trees, and his
entire crop of okra, cucumbers and eggplants. The new date palms he planted
two years ago have died; the older ones have held on, but their branches are
yellowing, while the annual crop of dates has become meager.

Walking in his emaciated groves, he said, "This used to be paradise."

Iraq's leaders, struggling first with the post-Saddam Hussein strife and now
with a political impasse that has delayed the formation of a new government,
have so far been unable to do much to avert the catastrophe unfolding here,
let alone reverse it.

Efficient water management throughout the country remains more a goal than a
reality. The government is drafting plans to build its own dam on the Shatt
-- to keep the sea water out -- but the cost and complexity of the idea
remains prohibitive, according to Mr. Mutashar.

Iraq has held repeated talks with neighboring countries to increase the
river's flow, resulting in pledges of cooperation, but with a drought
hitting the region in recent years, not much more water.

"If our government was good and strong, we would get our rights," said
Hassam Alwan Hamoud, the 71-year-old patriarch of a Bedouin family that
lives in reed huts on the marshlands adjoining the Shatt near Abu Khasib.
Instead, they move with their water buffaloes as the salt water dictates.
"Our government just talks. They are weak."

Mr. Rashid, the minister of water resources, said the problem was decades in
the making and would take decades to address.

One benefit of the country's democracy, he said, was that the problems had
become public, something that did not happen under Mr. Hussein's rule. "It
has come to the surface now," he said, "because Iraq is a free
country."



Jeff Snyder, SysOp - Armageddon BBS  Visit us at endtimeprophecy.org port 23
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