ANKARA: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday told Turkiye it was “imperative” to work against a resurgence of Daesh in Syria following the fall of Bashar Assad.
The top US diplomat also said he saw “encouraging signs” on reaching a ceasefire in the war-torn Gaza Strip.
His remarks came on the second leg of a whirlwind regional tour following Bashar Assad’s ouster in a lightning offensive spearheaded by Islamist-led HTS militants, ending five decades of repressive rule by his clan.
He flew to Turkiye on Thursday evening where he met for more than an hour with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at Ankara airport, a US official said.
“Our country worked very hard and gave a lot over many years to ensure the elimination of the territorial caliphate of Daesh, to ensure that threat doesn’t rear its head again,” Blinken said.
“And it’s imperative we keep at those efforts.”
In response, Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan told Blinken Turkiye was committed to ensuring stability in Syria “as soon as possible” and “preventing Daesh” militants from gaining a foothold there.
On Thursday, Erdogan assured Blinken Turkiye would never ease up in the fight against Daesh in Syria, despite its operations against Kurdish fighters seen as key to containing the extremists.
“Turkiye will never allow any weakness to arise in the fight against Daesh,” Erdogan said while vowing not to let up in its pursuit of groups Ankara sees as a threat to its national security.
As the militants marched on Damascus, Turkiye and its proxies began their own offensive against the Kurdish-led SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces).
Turkiye sees the SDF as an extension of the banned PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) that has fought a decades-long insurgency on Turkish soil.
But Washington sees the force as a key ally for spearheading an offensive that defeated Daesh’s self-declared caliphate in Syria in 2019, with Blinken saying Thursday the SDF was “critical” to preventing a jihadist resurgence there.
The fighting between the two proxy forces has raised concern about the NATO allies’ competing interests in Syria.
Faik Bulut, an expert on the Kurdish question, told AFP Turkiye was likely seeking “to take advantage of the vacuum to cleanse the region” of Kurdish fighters.
That way Erdogan could “be in a position of strength” during talks with incoming US president Donald Trump, he assessed.
With Turkiye’s own powerful military, control over its Syrian proxy forces and influence over the HTS militants that ousted Assad, Erdogan could likely tell Trump: “’Hand this region to me and I will destroy Daesh. Give me responsibility and you’ll see’,” Balut said.
Blinken also said he saw “encouraging signs” of progress toward a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, urging Turkiye to use its influence to encourage Hamas to accept.
“We discussed Gaza, and we discussed I think the opportunity... to get a ceasefire in place. And what we’ve seen in the last couple of weeks are more encouraging signs that that is possible,” Blinken said.
Blinken, who leaves office next month following Trump’s election victory, began his tour in Jordan on Thursday on his 12th visit to the Middle East since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel that triggered the Gaza war.
“We talked about the imperative of Hamas saying ‘yes’ to the agreement that’s possible, to finally help bring this to an end,” he said.
“We appreciate very much the role Turkiye can play in using its voice with Hamas to try to bring this to conclusion.”
Turkiye has long had close ties with Hamas, viewing it as a national liberation movement rather than a proscribed terror organization like most Western nations.
A blistering critic of Israel, Erdogan has frequently hosted Hamas’ political leaders who have used Istanbul as one of their foreign bases during his two-decade rule.
‘Imperative’ to work against Daesh in Syria, Blinken tells Turkiye
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‘Imperative’ to work against Daesh in Syria, Blinken tells Turkiye
- Blinken also said he saw ‘encouraging signs’ of progress toward ceasefire in Gaza
- Called on Turkiye to influence Hamas to achieve exchange deal
Iraq’s dreams of wheat independence dashed by water crisis
- Iraq ranks fifth globally for climate risk
- Average temperatures in Iraq have risen nearly half a degree Celsius per decade since 2000
NAJAF: Iraqi wheat farmer Ma’an Al-Fatlawi has long depended on the nearby Euphrates River to feed his fields near the city of Najaf. But this year, those waters, which made the Fertile Crescent a cradle of ancient civilization 10,000 years ago, are drying up, and he sees few options.
“Drilling wells is not successful in our land, because the water is saline,” Al-Fatlawi said, as he stood by an irrigation canal near his parched fields awaiting the release of his allotted water supply.
A push by Iraq — historically among the Middle East’s biggest wheat importers — to guarantee food security by ensuring wheat production covers the country’s needs has led to three successive annual surpluses of the staple grain.
But those hard-won advances are now under threat as the driest year in modern history and record-low water levels in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers have reduced planting and could slash the harvest by up to 50 percent this season.
“Iraq is facing one of the most severe droughts that has been observed in decades,” the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Iraq representative Salah El Hajj Hassan told Reuters.
VULNERABLE TO NATURE AND NEIGHBOURS
The crisis is laying bare Iraq’s vulnerability.
A largely desert nation, Iraq ranks fifth globally for climate risk, according to the UN’s Global Environment Outlook. Average temperatures in Iraq have risen nearly half a degree Celsius per decade since 2000 and could climb by up to 5.6 C by the end of the century compared to the period before industrialization, according to the International Energy Agency. Rainfall is projected to decline.
But Iraq is also at the mercy of its neighbors for 70 percent of its water supply. And Turkiye and Iran have been using upstream dams to take a greater share of the region’s shared resource.
The FAO says the diminishing amount of water that has trickled down to Iraq is the biggest factor behind the current crisis, which has forced Baghdad to introduce rationing.
Iraq’s water reserves have plunged from 60 billion cubic meters in 2020 to less than 4 billion today, said El Hajj Hassan, who expects wheat production this season to drop by 30 percent to 50 percent.
“Rain-fed and irrigated agriculture are directly affected nationwide,” he said.
EFFORTS TO END IMPORT DEPENDENCE UNDER THREAT
To wean the country off its dependence on imports, Iraq’s government has in recent years paid for high-yield seeds and inputs, promoted modern irrigation and desert farming to expand cultivation, and subsidised grain purchases to offer farmers more than double global wheat prices.
It is a plan that, though expensive, has boosted strategic wheat reserves to over 6 million metric tons in some seasons, overwhelming Iraq’s silo capacity. The government, which purchased around 5.1 million tons of the 2025 harvest, said in September that those reserves could meet up to a year of demand.
Others, however, including Harry Istepanian — a water expert and founder of Iraq Climate Change Center — now expect imports to rise again, putting the country at greater risk of higher food prices with knock-on effects for trade and government budgets.
“Iraq’s water and food security crisis is no longer just an environmental problem; it has immediate economic and security spillovers,” Istepanian told Reuters.
A preliminary FAO forecast anticipates wheat import needs for the 2025/26 marketing year to increase to about 2.4 million tons.
Global wheat markets are currently oversupplied, offering cheaper options, but Iraq could once again face price volatility.
Iraq’s trade ministry did not respond to a request for comment on the likelihood of increased imports.
In response to the crisis, the ministry of agriculture capped river-irrigated wheat at 1 million dunams in the 2025/26 season — half last season’s level — and mandated modern irrigation techniques including drip and sprinkler systems to replace flood irrigation through open canals, which loses water through evaporation and seepage.
A dunam is a measurement of area roughly equivalent to a quarter acre.
The ministry is allocating 3.5 million dunams in desert areas using groundwater. That too is contingent on the use of modern irrigation.
“The plan was implemented in two phases,” said Mahdi Dhamad Al-Qaisi, an adviser to the agriculture minister. “Both require modern irrigation.”
Rice cultivation, meanwhile, which is far more water-intensive than wheat, was banned nationwide.
RURAL LIVELIHOODS AT RISK
One ton of wheat production in Iraq requires about 1,100 cubic meters of water, said Ammar Abdul-Khaliq, head of the Wells and Groundwater Authority in southern Iraq. Pivoting to more dependence on wells to replace river water is risky.
“If water extraction continues without scientific study, groundwater reserves will decline,” he said.
Basra aquifers, he said, have already fallen by three to five meters.
Groundwater irrigation systems are also expensive due to the required infrastructure like sprinklers and concrete basins. That presents a further economic challenge to rural Iraqis, who make up around 30 percent of the population.
Some 170,000 people have already been displaced in rural areas due to water scarcity, the FAO’s El Hajj Hassan said.
“This is not a matter of only food security,” he said. “It’s worse when we look at it from the perspective of livelihoods.”
At his farm in Najaf, Al-Fatlawi is now experiencing that first-hand, having cut his wheat acreage to a fifth of its normal level this season and laid off all but two of his 10 workers.
“We rely on river water,” he said.
