Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has agreed to increase the flow of water from the Euphrates and Tigris rivers to Iraq following a meeting with the speaker of the Iraqi Parliament, Mahmoud al-Mashadani, in Ankara on Tuesday. The Iraqi News Agency said Turkey agreed to increase the water flow to a total of 420 cubic meters per second, effective Wednesday, following a request by Mashadani. While measures of flow rates vary, the figure is a substantial increase.

The Iraqi Parliament noted in a statement, “Turkey shares what God has bestowed upon it with its brothers in Iraq and will not withhold it from them.” 

The agreement marks a breakthrough for the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Shia al-Sudani at the peak of the scorching summer season and as it heads for elections in October. The groundwork for the deal was laid last year when Erdogan and Sudani signed a multibillion-dollar agreement in Baghdad to manage shared water resources over the next decade. 

Why it matters: Iraq and Syria, Turkey’s other downstream neighbor, suffer from chronic drought, which severely disrupts agriculture and causes desertification. Both rely heavily on the Euphrates and the Tigris, both of which originate in Turkey. Iraq and Syria have for decades accused Turkey of restricting their share of the water by building a string of mega dams in its Kurdish-majority southeastern provinces. In 2022, Iraq claimed that the level of the Tigris River had plummeted by 60% over the course of a single year due to construction of Turkey's Ilisu Dam.