Huh. Urging Prayers For Rain In Iran Ineffective - God Appears Helpless Against Bad Infrastructure, Corruption, Drought
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Iran has entered its sixth consecutive year of drought. The five major reservoirs that supply Tehran are down to an average 10 percent of their capacity. Around the country, 19 others are below 5 percent, according to state media. Oil is not the only precious resource handled poorly by the Islamic Republic. Today’s empty reservoirs, dried wetlands and depleted aquifers stem largely from decades of poor water management by the clerical establishment, including unchecked urban expansion and excessive dam construction by what analysts and activists have dubbed the “Water Mafia”: the beneficiaries of billion-dollar megaprojects, including the Khatam-al Anbiya Construction Headquarters, the engineering arm of the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. These problems have been exacerbated by the extended drought, of course, and, to an extent, Western economic sanctions, producing Iran’s worst water crisis in decades.
“The water bankruptcy problem of Iran is too obvious to be denied,” Kaveh Madani, director of the United Nations University’s Institute for Water, Environment and Health, told me. But he said officials are still downplaying the severity. “I’m not convinced that the roots of the problem are well understood and that the leadership is ready to pay the political cost of the necessary fundamental reforms,” he added. (In 2017, the security apparatus forced Madani, then the deputy head of the country’s Department of Environment, to flee just months after recruiting him from abroad to address the water problem.)
Though Tehran did finally receive some scattered showers in recent weeks, it wasn’t nearly enough. Clerics urged Iranians to pray for rain — and, in one instance, said the drought might be God’s punishment for women’s failure to abide by the hijab requirement. The clerical establishment has also blamed foreign sanctions and damage caused to infrastructure by the 12-day war with Israel. Some observers also cite climate change, though it is usually seen as a contributor, not the root cause.
But many Iranians see the crisis as yet another product of the Islamic Republic’s systemic mismanagement and corruption. Water protests have erupted repeatedly, including one in 2021 in southwest Khuzestan province, where security forces reportedly responded with deadly force. At protests later that year in central Isfahan province, dozens of demonstrators lost at least one eye to pellet guns fired by security forces. In August, demonstrators in southwestern Fars province chanted, “Water, electricity, life is our inherent right” — a bitter play on an old chant backing the country’s controversial nuclear program, which declared, “Nuclear energy is our inherent right.”
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/11/28/iran-drought-tehran-protests/