Water scarcity reshapes Najaf’s longstanding salt economy

Shafaq News – Najaf

Before dawn settles over Iraq’s Najaf province, Hassan Hamdi Khuwait steps out of his home and follows a path he has known since childhood. This quiet walk is a practice handed down through generations, a small ceremony that connects him to a lineage shaped by the Sea of Najaf.

With each passing year, however, the land he crosses looks subtly altered, marked by a growing dryness that has redrawn the geography he once took for granted. What was once a stable landscape now carries the visible signs of climate stress, reshaping a routine that once felt immutable.

Known locally as Bahr Al-Najaf, the Sea of Najaf is a seasonal inland basin stretching west of the city. For centuries, it collected floodwaters and underground flows, forming a natural salt reservoir that supported a traditional economy passed down through families like Hassan’s. Once a broad, shimmering expanse, Bahr Al-Najaf steadily contracted in recent decades under declining rainfall, rising temperatures, and disrupted water systems. What remains today is a fragmented body of retreating pools struggling against the region’s intensifying heat.

At the salt flats, Hassan joins his brothers in a routine that relies on precision and endurance. They draw water into shallow squares, stir it until it clouds, and leave it under the sun for months. The transformation is slow and exacting, demanding careful control of texture, timing, and temperature. But the equilibrium that once governed the craft is no longer reliable. The process no longer follows familiar seasonal rhythms; surfaces behave unpredictably, and the mineral formations that once accumulated evenly now emerge in irregular patterns, forcing the family to adjust methods that had remained unchanged for decades.

The disruption facing Najaf’s salt workers mirrors changes rippling across Iraq. In northern provinces, natural basins have increasingly failed to recharge during seasonal cycles. In the south, rising salinity has forced authorities to invest in treatment technologies once considered unnecessary. The Shatt Al-Arab, long central to southern agriculture and daily life, now carries pollutants that affect drinking water, livestock, and farmlands. Though the causes vary—from reduced river inflows to rising temperatures—the outcome is consistent: traditional systems are being pushed beyond the conditions they were built to endure.

Environmental stress is unfolding alongside chronic infrastructure failure. Iraq’s water reservoirs have accumulated sediment faster than they have been maintained, while irrigation canals lose vast quantities through leakage before reaching farms. According to Iraqi water specialists, national allocation policies—many drafted decades ago—have not adjusted to modern consumption patterns or intensifying climate extremes. With losses compounding across supply chains, local communities are left with increasingly limited capacity to absorb sudden fluctuations, magnifying the strain on families like Hassan’s.

For Najaf’s salt workers, the consequences are immediate and measurable. Their product supplies tanneries, sesame mills, livestock-feed operations, and aluminum processors that rely on salt in production. The return—about 40,000 dinars per ton (roughly $30)—has never been generous, but it once offered a dependable, if modest, livelihood in a region with few alternatives. That dependability is now slipping away.

“If we stop working, the factories will turn to imported salt,” Hassan says. “And we will have nothing left.” His voice remains steady, but the uncertainty is unmistakable. A craft that once felt secure now stands exposed to forces entirely beyond the control of those who inherited it.

“We inherited this work,” Hassan says, watching the receding flats. “I don’t know if my children will inherit anything at all.” Fine grains of salt drift over the remnants of a sea that no longer resembles the one his ancestors knew—marking not only the erosion of a landscape, but the quiet unraveling of a generational economy shaped by water, sun, and time.

Read more: Iraq’s water crisis deepens: Reserves collapse, mismanagement continues