Illegal fishing pressures fish stocks in Al-Anbar

Shafaq News- Al-Anbar

Illegal fishing threatens fish stocks in Iraq’s Al-Anbar province, as recently rising water levels in the Euphrates River make fishing activity harder to monitor, an Iraqi official told Shafaq News.

Qais Najeh, director of Al-Anbar’s Environment Directorate, said on Tuesday that the local government had contacted the province’s Operations Command, police, and other security agencies to step up patrols along the Euphrates and curb illegal fishing.

Environmental specialist Ali Al-Fahd explained that rising water levels can alter fish movements, spreading them across wider stretches of the river and connected waterways and making illegal fishing harder to detect.

“Fishing methods that catch large quantities of fish or target smaller specimens can deplete stocks and reduce the number of fish available to reproduce, weakening the population’s ability to recover naturally,” he added, urging a closer monitoring of areas vulnerable to illegal fishing and action against harmful fishing methods.

Al-Fahd also called for greater awareness among fishermen of the need to follow environmental regulations, warning that illegal fishing threatens both their livelihoods and food supplies that depend on fish.

The Green Iraq Observatory estimated on August 8 that more than 1,000 metric tons of fish had been lost across Iraq in 2026.

Read more: What is killing Iraq’s fish? The evidence points to no single cause