CAIRO: Egypt’s Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry will visit Addis Ababa next week for talks with his Ethiopian counterpart, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said, in a bid to end a standoff over a multi-billion dollar dam project on the Nile river.
The dispute, which also involves Sudan, centers on control of a share of the waters of the Nile that stretches 6,695 km from Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean and is the economic lifeblood of all three countries.
Cairo says the dam would threaten water supplies that have fed Egypt’s agriculture and economy for thousands of years.
Ethiopia says the Grand Renaissance Dam, which it hopes will help make it Africa’s largest power exporter, will have no major effect on Egypt. It accuses Cairo of flexing its political muscle to deter financiers from backing other Ethiopian power projects.
Delegations from Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia met in Cairo in November to approve a study by a French firm commissioned to assess the dam’s environmental and economic impact.
But negotiations stalled when they failed to agree on the initial report with each blaming others for blocking progress.
Sudan’s Irrigation Minister Moataz Moussa said Egypt was unwilling to accept amendments to the report put forward by Khartoum and Addis Ababa.
Sudan and Ethiopia had expressed concern over several points, especially the proposed baseline from which the study would measure the dam’s impacts, Moussa said in November.
Another source of disagreement is whether Ethiopia plans to complete construction before negotiations over water flows have finished.
“It’s clear they don’t want to reach conclusions quickly. We believe they probably want to start filling the dam and complete construction while there are still some ongoing discussions,” said Mahmoud Abou Zeid, Arab Water Council Chair and former Egyptian irrigation minister.
He said this would violate an agreement signed by all three countries in Khartoum in 2015 meant to ensure diplomatic cooperation and stem fears of a resource conflict.
Cairo fears the 6,000-megawatt dam, being built by Italy’s largest construction firm, Salini Impregilo SpA, and due for completion next year, will reduce the flow it depends on for drinking water and irrigation.
Egyptian officials say safeguarding the country’s quota of Nile water is a matter of national security.
“No one can touch Egypt’s water ... (which) means life or death for a population,” President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi said last month.
Egypt, Ethiopia to hold key talks over controversial dam project
Egypt, Ethiopia to hold key talks over controversial dam project
Syrian leader to meet Putin, Russia seeks deal on military bases
- Russia’s continued sheltering of Assad and his wife since their ouster remains a thorny issue
MOSCOW: Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa will meet Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Wednesday, as the Kremlin seeks to secure the future of its military bases in the country.
Putin and Sharaa struck a conciliatory tone at their previous meeting in October, their first since Sharaa’s rebel forces toppled Moscow-ally Bashar Assad in 2024.
But Russia’s continued sheltering of Assad and his wife since their ouster remains a thorny issue. Sharaa has repeatedly pushed Russia for their extradition.
Sharaa, meanwhile, has embraced US President Donald Trump, who on Tuesday praised the Syrian leader as “highly respected” and said things were “working out very well.”
Putin, whose influence in the Middle East has waned since Assad’s ouster, is seeking to maintain Russia’s military footprint in the region.
Russia withdrew its forces from the Qamishli airport in Kurdish-held northeast Syria earlier this week, leaving it with only the Hmeimim air base and Tartus naval base on Syria’s Mediterranean coast — its only military outposts outside the former Soviet Union.
“A discussion is planned on the status of bilateral relations and prospects for developing them in various fields, as well as the current situation in the Middle East,” the Kremlin said of the upcoming meeting in a statement on Tuesday.
Russia was a key ally of Assad during the bloody 14-year Syrian civil war, launching air strikes on rebel-held areas of Syria controlled by Sharaa’s Islamist forces.
The toppling of Assad dealt a major blow to Russia’s influence in the region and laid bare the limits of Moscow’s military reach amid the Ukraine war.
The United States, which cheered Assad’s demise, has fostered ever-warmer ties with Sharaa — even as Damascus launched a recent offensive against Kurdish forces long backed by the West.
Despite Trump’s public praise, both the United States and Europe have expressed concern that the offensive in Syria’s northeast could precipitate the return of Islamic State forces held in Kurdish-held jails.
