The water table is falling in Egypt's desert oases, raising questions of sustainability. Credit: Cam McGrath/IPS

By Cam McGrath
BAHARIYA OASIS, Egypt, Jul 12 2014 (IPS)

Using a hoe, farmer Atef Sayyid removes an earthen plug in an irrigation stream, allowing water to spill onto the parcel of land where he grows dates, olives and almonds.

Until recently, a natural spring exploited since Roman times supplied the iron-rich water that he uses for irrigation. But when the spring began to dry up in the 1990s, the government built a deep well to supplement its waning flow.

Today, a noisy diesel pump syphons water from over a kilometre below the ground. The steaming-hot water is diverted through a maze of earthen canals to irrigate the orchards and palm groves that lie below the dusty town of Bawiti, 300 kilometres southwest of Cairo.

“The deeper source means the water is hotter,” Sayyid explains. “The hot water damages the roots of the fruit trees. It also evaporates quicker, meaning we have to use more water to irrigate.”

Bahariya, the depression in which Bawiti is situated, is one of five major oases in Egypt’s Western Desert. While Egyptians living in the densely populated Nile River Valley and Delta depend on the Nile for their freshwater needs, communities in this remote and arid region rely entirely on underground sources.“This [water drawn from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer] is fossil water, which means it was deposited a very long time ago and is not being replenished. So once you pump the water out of the aquifer, it’s gone for good” – resource management specialist Richard Tutwiler

Since ancient times, freshwater has percolated through fissures in the bedrock, making agriculture possible in the otherwise inhospitable desert. Water was once so plentiful in the five oases that they were collectively known as a breadbasket of the Roman Empire on account of their intensive grain cultivation.

Ominously, where groundwater once flowed naturally or was tapped near the surface, farmers must now bore up to a kilometre underground, raising fears for the region’s sustainability.

“Historically, springs and artesian wells supplied all the water in the oases,” says Richard Tutwiler, a resource management specialist at the American University in Cairo. “But water pressure is dropping and increasingly it has to be pumped out, particularly as you go from south to north.”

The water is drawn from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer, an underground reservoir of fossil water accumulated over tens of thousands of years when the Saharan region was less arid than it is today. The vast aquifer extends beneath much of Egypt, Libya, Sudan and Chad, and is estimated to hold 150,000 cubic kilometres of groundwater.

But it is a finite resource, says Tutwiler.

“This is fossil water, which means it was deposited a very long time ago and is not being replenished,” he told IPS. “So once you pump the water out of the aquifer, it’s gone for good.”

Extraction is intensifying in all of the countries that share the aquifer. In Egypt alone, an estimated 700 million cubic metres of water is pumped from deep wells each year.

The increase in water usage is the result of agricultural expansion and population growth. Nearly 2,000 square kilometres of desert land has been reclaimed by groundwater irrigation in the last 60 years. Farmers employ flood irrigation, a traditional technique in which half the water is lost to evaporation and ground seepage before reaching the crops.

Since the 1980s, government programmes aimed at alleviating population pressure on the Nile Valley have encouraged Egyptian families to relocate to the desert. Existing oasis communities have grown while new ones have sprung up around deep wells.

One of these settlements, Abu Minqar, was founded in 1987 and now boasts over 4,000 residents. The isolated community only exists because of its 15 wells, which draw groundwater from depths of up to 1,200 metres.

“Water management in (places like) Abu Minqar must be sustainable,” says Tutwiler. “Because if the wells dry up, it’s game over.”

The number of wells in the Western Desert has increased immensely since the first appearance of percussion drilling machinery 150 years ago. Records show that in 1960 there were less than 30 deep wells in all the oases – today there are nearly 3,000.

In Dakhla Oasis, 550 kilometres southwest of Cairo, natural springs and 900 wells provide water for the 80,000 inhabitants of the oasis, as well as orchards that produce date palms, citrus fruits and mulberries. This was traditionally one of Egypt’s most fertile oases because of the proximity of the aquifer to the surface – less than 100 metres throughout the depression.

But here, as elsewhere, water sources that flowed freely less than a generation ago now only flow with the aid of mechanical pumps. Groundwater extraction has exceeded 500,000 cubic metres a day and the water table is dropping, in some places by nearly two metres a year.

“There are too many straws in the same glass of water,” remarks hydrologist Maghawry Diab

While Diab estimates the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer may hold enough water to last the next 100 years, Egypt’s desert communities could have a lot less time.

Over-pumping has created localised “dry pockets” in the aquifer, which behaves more like a layered damp sponge than a pool of water. Tightly-spaced deep wells are drawing down the water table, while their overlapping well cones intercept upward flowing groundwater before it can recharge the shallower wells.

“All the wells are tapping the same larger cone of depression,” Diab told IPS. “To gain years, we’ll have to find even deeper groundwater sources or (come to terms with) using saline water.”

In an effort to reduce pressure on groundwater resources, Egypt’s government has set restrictions on the drilling of new wells and reduced the discharge rates of certain high-productive ones.

At government wells, a formalised system of water sharing is in place. But farmers thirsty for more water have drilled their own wells, concealing them from authorities or bribing local officials to turn a blind eye.

“We have tried to control the drilling, but there is a lot of resistance from farmers,” says one former irrigation ministry official. “Every time we capped (an unlicensed) well, two more would appear.”

The destroyed Tabu neighbourhood at Gadarfai in southern Libya. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS.

By Rebecca Murray
KUFRA, southern Libya, Oct 20 2012 (IPS)

Safia’s six-year-old body is riddled with scars from the rocket that hit her home in February. With her immediate family all killed in the violent attack, this sole survivor smiles shyly as she visits the medics that fought to save her life.

Their makeshift clinic is in Kufra’s impoverished and war-torn Gadarfai neighbourhood, a segregated stretch of flimsy dwellings, piles of rubbish and scorched earth occupied by the indigenous Tabu tribe.

Spent ordnance and a gaping hole left by a mortar round in the clinic’s compound is a reminder of the recent brutal clashes between the Tabu and the town’s majority Arab tribe, the Zwai, over local power sharing and lucrative cross-border smuggling routes.

As fighting got under way, Tabu medical staff at Kufra’s downtown government hospital were threatened.

“I worked there for ten years as a nurse,” says Khadija Hamed Yousef. “The Zwai security guard and ambulance driver came in with Kalashnikovs and warned: ‘This is your last day or we will shoot you’.”

Since the July ceasefire, the Tabu clinics in Gadarfai and Shura are still overcrowded, and lack equipment and medicine. Two North Korean doctors recently assigned to the facilities by the Ministry of Health speak only their native language.

Fearful pregnant Tabu women bring Zwai acquaintances to Kufra’s hospital during childbirth to ensure their safety, and Tabu with serious injuries or illnesses now travel outside for care.

The small oasis town of Kufra lies hundreds of miles south of the Mediterranean, in Libya’s isolated Saharan corner bordering Egypt, Sudan and Chad.

While Kufra’s Zwai tribe benefited from Gaddafi’s favouritism, the semi-nomadic Tabu were deprived of citizenship and ID cards, accused of being ‘foreign’ despite generations born on Libyan soil. They faced state-sanctioned discrimination in jobs, education and housing.

Local roles during the revolution against the Gaddafi reflected this pecking order: the Zwai largely backed the status quo while the Tabu – whose networks stretch west to Sebha, and south into Chad, Niger and Sudan – joined the rebellion to fight for their rights.

Once the revolution was won, Kufra’s tribal-driven conflict over the spoils was ignited last November at a desert checkpoint.

A weak response from the Tripoli-based government and international community did little to quell a raging battle in February, which broke out again in April and June.

Almost 200 were killed, the majority Tabu, with hundreds more injured before the ceasefire took hold.

While the Tebu move freely across the area’s desert, the Zwai control Kufra’s local government, downtown commercial zone and the airport. During the clashes the Zwai held sway over who entered the town, including humanitarian aid.

The defence ministry’s decision in March to assign as peacekeepers the Shield of Libya – a loose-knit collection of ill-disciplined militias from the northeast – disastrously backfired.

Biased towards Zwai claims that Kufra was under attack from Tabu ‘outsiders’, the fighters soon aimed their weapons at the Tabu in besieged Gadarfai and Shura communities.

Halim Abdullah Mohammed, 26, was a core staff member working a 24-hour shift throughout the February clashes at the Gadarfai clinic, sandwiched between two Zwai checkpoints and often under direct fire.

They received over 200 patients then, half of whom are recorded as women and children.

She admits her first aid training was hopelessly inadequate for the patients they received. There was the 12-year old girl whose head was partially blown off by a mortar and died, and the 29-year-old man with a bullet in his head that they managed to save.

“We controlled bleeding with bandages, used local anesthetic and sutures,” Mohammed says.

With electricity cuts there was no water, no refrigeration, and little medication. They operated with flashlights, using dirty well water and direct blood transfusions.

Unable to bury the dead for fear of being shot themselves, the medical staff stacked bodies in the compound’s guardroom. They decomposed in the desert heat.

Across town, in Shura neighbourhood, Rajab Hamid Suri quietly sobs as he recounts the death of his 16-year old son Mohammed. Hit by a mortar targeting their home, he bled to death slowly at Shura’s makeshift clinic next door. “He was talking. We didn’t expect him to die,” he says.

Tabu medical staff underscore the lack of aid they received under siege, and describe how they were forced to ferry some seriously wounded across the desert hundreds of miles west to Murzuq for treatment.

They say they received no support from the local Red Crescent Society, and that the Tripoli-based International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) conducted medical evacuations only.

In April, Amnesty International released an urgent statement appealing for humanitarian access. “We also asked that individuals should not be denied health care based on their identity, and should be protected when seeking care in the Kufra hospital,” says Libya researcher Diana Eltahawy.

“In terms of the Red Crescent, there is some truth to what the Tabu are saying,” she explains. “However, when a member of the Red Crescent tried to deliver aid someone on the Tabu side attacked him and no one tried to intervene. So the picture is a bit mixed.”

Laurent Perrelet, an ICRC protection delegate, was in Kufra in June during an evacuation of wounded. “It was most dangerous transporting Tabu from the clinics to the airport in vehicles,” he describes.

“What was striking were the clinics. There were a lot of wounded and not enough space to accommodate them. They were outside the clinic – within the compounds, but outside.”

Perrelet believes training Tabu and Zwai Red Crescent volunteers should be a primary focus, as well as figuring out “how we can work together in Kufra, and with the Red Crescent.”

Halima Salah, an energetic 28-year old nurse, juggles her intensive schedule at the Shura clinic with caring for a son with cerebral palsy, and her civil society organisation that promotes dialogue between Tabu and Zwai.

“I still talk with one of my close Zwai friends,” she says. “During the clashes we couldn’t because it involved families. But now we do and we ask each other: ‘Why are you sending mortars instead of tomatoes?’”

The Tabu border guard in the Sahara in southern Libya. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS.

By Walter García and Rebecca Murray
ZWEILA, Southern Libya, Oct 11 2012 (IPS)

A group of Tabu fighters with mud-splattered trucks rest on the outskirts of Zweila, a small historic slave-trade stop in Libya’s southwest Sahara.

Far from their home base of Kufra, hundreds of miles to the east, these men belong to a desert border patrol loyal to charismatic Tabu commander Issa Abdel Majid Mansour.

They police the country’s vast and seemingly impenetrable southern frontier with Sudan, Chad and Niger – an arduous off-road trek over towering sand dunes, volcanic rock and scattered minefields – using smugglers’ markers and the stars as a guide.

The indigenous, semi-nomadic Tabu, marginalised by Muammar Gaddafi under his ‘Arabisation’ campaign, staked out a leading role during the 2011 revolution with a goal to secure their civil rights.

Combining their intimate knowledge of the Sahara with a tribal network spanning both sides of the borders, they forged a successful blockade against pro-regime reinforcements.

When the revolution was won, a grateful transitional government controversially awarded Mansour oversight over vital desert crossings to the detriment of Kufra’s majority Arab Zwai tribe.

The Zwai, whose ties stretch over oil-rich territory to Ajdabiya, 150km south of Benghazi, previously benefited from Gaddafi’s divide-and-rule tactics.

Besides securing national oilfields, Mansour says their priority is to prevent extremist militias, including Al Qaeda, from the lucrative business of smuggling subsidised fuel and food out of Libya, and ferrying weapons and drugs in.

“I worry about terrorists,” he says intently. “They are dangerous – we need to stop them getting more power in the desert.”

Security is a critical concern for the Libyan government, especially in the aftermath of the deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi by a suspected Islamist militia last month.

Jolted into action by a subsequent outpouring of public outrage, the government now faces an uphill battle to integrate or disarm poorly trained armed groups loosely affiliated with the state security apparatus along Libya’s coastal belt.

But often overlooked is the volatile, less populous south, home to significant oil reserves, rare minerals, Gaddafi’s man-made river project which feeds water to the north, and the profitable cross-border smuggling of illicit goods.

The Tripoli-based government has failed to address tribal and economic grievances at the heart of this year’s deadly clashes between Tabu and Arab tribes in the southern trade hubs of Kufra and Sebha, now governed by fragile ceasefires.

On an international level, competing regional interests have reduced information-sharing between foreign embassies and a cohesive approach to government ministries.

The U.S. believes Islamic extremist groups, including Al Qaeda, are trying to forge supply lines through southern Libya to its neighbours. It appears poised to introduce a more robust role for the U.S. Africa military command, AFRICOM, in its expanding ‘war on terror’.

Meanwhile, the French strive to retain a monopoly on the mineral-rich region, which they traditionally regard as their post-colonial backyard.

Navigating east across the steep, Saharan sand dunes, a surreal concrete enclave looms in the distance. This is the remote Kufra oasis, once a welcome sight for tired desert travelers.

When Kufra’s violence ended in an uneasy ceasefire last June, the Zwai erected the barrier, encircling the bitterly divided town and its population of 44,000.

The Zwai are convinced that the town’s Tabu community is mostly foreign, and is seeking to carve out an autonomous homeland. Their other concern is control over the south’s most profitable livelihood, smuggling.

Victors in the revolution, Tabu smugglers eek out a subsistence living quite freely, crisscrossing the borders in small Toyota pickup trucks loaded with cheap fuel and migrants.

But the large commercial trucks owned by Zwai businessmen – who until recently made small fortunes from illicit border trade – currently stand idle.

“The Zwai, economically speaking, want to control the area from Kufra towards the Egyptian and Sudanese border because of smuggling. They call it trade, but it’s actually smuggling,” says Fathi Baja, professor of political science at Benghazi University.

“There are also Islamist groups that want to control borders,” he adds.

Tabu and Zwai residents now stick to their heavily guarded neighbourhoods in Kufra.

Small numbers of official army troops guard the town’s invisible borders, having replaced the Shield of Libya auxiliary forces initially dispatched as a neutral buffer after clashes in February.

“The Minister of Defence gave orders to Islamists to go down, control the borders and sort out the issue,” says Rami Al-Shahiebi, one of the few journalists who travelled to Kufra in February.

The undisciplined Shield soon turned their weapons on the Tabu, Al-Shahiebi says. Convinced by the more media-savvy Zwai and Libyan broadcasts from Tripoli that ‘foreigners’ were invading, fighters trekked from as far as the coastal town Misrata for battle.

After hundreds were killed and the Tripoli government was sufficiently embarrassed by the role of their appointed ‘peacekeepers’, a ceasefire was brokered between the Shield and Tabu in June.

Fawzia Idris, an outgoing 37-year-old Tabu nurse in Kufra’s Shura district, is part of a volunteer effort to plant one-foot-tall saplings amongst the piles of rubbish. “To make the neighbourhood beautiful,” she explains.

“Racism and control of the border are the big things,” Idris says. “We are Muslim, but maybe because we are black and not white they think we are not Libyan. The same people who are working with Gaddafi are still in charge. There is no change.”

The Tabu maintain close familial ties in Chad, Niger and Sudan. Although many don’t own Libyan citizenship papers, first issued under King Idriss in 1954, they can trace family ancestors back to the same Libyan tracts of land.

The Tabu bore the brunt of Gaddafi’s rage over the defeat of Libya’s war with Chad over the mineral-rich Ouzou Strip in 1996. Many were stripped of citizenship, deprived of education, health and work, and had their homes demolished.

An estimated 4,000 of Kufra’s Tabu residents are now hemmed into the impoverished ghettos of Gadarfa and Shura. Rotting piles of garbage surround shacks built with sticks, cardboard and jagged pieces of corrugated iron. Homes, schools and the makeshift clinics are pockmarked or blackened by mortar rounds from the recent fighting.

The Tabu talk with deep bitterness about what they see is the transitional government’s betrayal of promises to grant them equal rights after their revolutionary role, and the prognosis for a Libyan constitution inclusive of minority rights appears dim.

Hassan Mousa, a Tabu military spokesman from Kufra, is direct. “The stability of the south depends on Tabu rights. And Libya’s stability depends on the south’s stability,” he warns.