Dam Safety Risk Reduction In A High-Risk Environment: Stabilizing and Rehabilitating Mosul Dam in an Area of Conflict

Snowmelt from the mountains of Turkey provides flow to the ancient waterways of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that have allowed civilization to develop and thrive over the past 5,500 years in ancient Mesopotamia in what is modern Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Water resource engineers, including the ancient Assyrians and the Sumerians before them, have worked to optimize the use of those resources. However, conflict over the control of these water resources has always existed and continued into the summer of 2014. The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or ISIS, had captured Tabqa Dam on the Euphrates River in Syria in 2013, and on August 7, 2014, the terrorist organization took control of Mosul Dam on the Tigris River in northern Iraq. By capturing Mosul Dam, ISIS gained nearly complete control of Iraq’s drinking and irrigation water and the electrical power supply for multiple cities. It now threatened approximately 6 million people living downstream of the dam.