Iran warns a quarter of Caspian Sea could dry up in 20 years
Up to a quarter of the Caspian Sea's water levels may dry up within the next 20 years, an Iranian government official has warned.
Up to a quarter of the Caspian Sea's water levels may dry up within the next 20 years, an Iranian government official has warned.
"Our shores have experienced significant retreat, raising concerns that our facilities and ports could be in jeopardy," an Iranian Environmental Protection Organization official, Omid Sedighi, told local media.
"Addressing this issue entails considerable expense, as extensive dredging is required to restore water access to the docks and ports. This poses a substantial threat," he added.
Addressing the challenges faced, Sedighi noted that the country's coastlines have "significantly receded," placing critical infrastructure, such as facilities and ports, at risk. He warned that if the current trend of declining water levels continues, it could lead to the drying up of other wetlands, render docks and ports inaccessible, and create serious issues for coastal power plants. Furthermore, he expressed concern that the situation could also jeopardize shrimp farming operations.
His remarks mirror concerns that Iranian officials have voiced for years. Last year, Iran’s Minister of Interior, Ahmad Vahidi, warned of the Caspian Sea's further decline in the coming decades, while refraining from addressing the regime’s neglect of ecological issues.
Similarly, Ali Salajegheh, head of the Iranian Department of Environment, underscored the ecological challenges posed by a one-meter reduction in the Caspian Sea's water level over the past 4-5 years, noting an average annual decline of 20 centimeters.
However, the predicament transcends Iran's borders. The Caspian Sea is bordered by Iran to the south, Turkmenistan to the southeast, Kazakhstan to the northeast, Russia to the northwest, and Azerbaijan to the southwest.
Scientific studies have revealed that the Caspian Sea's water levels, which have exhibited sharp fluctuations over the past century, have steadily declined since the mid-1990s.
However, since 2005, conditions have deteriorated even further. Russia's Volga River, which constitutes approximately 80 percent of the total water inflow into the Caspian Sea, has been a focal point of blame among the nations concerned with the sea's declining levels.
Earlier this month, expressing deep concern over the "catastrophic" shrinkage of the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev discussed the matter with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Last year, Kazakhstani officials declared a state of emergency in response to the recession of the shoreline, with the Environment Minister attributing the primary causes to “climate change as an exogenous factor” and the upstream “regulation” of rivers that feed into the lake, including the Volga and Ural, both originating in Russia.
According to NASA's Earth Observatory, a study utilizing several models projected that the Caspian Sea's water levels could decline by an additional 8 to 30 meters (26 to 98 feet) by 2100 due to climate change. Moreover, human activities such as water use and diversion could contribute to a further 7 meters (23 feet) of water loss. These projections underscore the significant impact of both natural and anthropogenic factors on the future of the Caspian Sea's water levels.
According to a study published in Nature, "a decline by 9–18 meters will mean that the vast northern Caspian shelf, the Turkmen shelf in the southeast, and all coastal areas in the middle and southern Caspian Sea emerge from under the sea surface. In addition, the Kara-Bogaz-Gol Bay on the eastern margin will be completely desiccated. Overall, the Caspian Sea’s surface area will shrink by 23 percent for a 9 meter and by 34 percent for an 18 meter drop of sea level." Scholar Vali Kaleji emphasizes that to address this critical issue, Caspian coastal nations must prioritize integrated, coordinated, and comprehensive policies and strategies.
Stopping short of pledging any direct action by the Jewish state itself, Netanyahu said the Iranian theocratic system that his country was confronting would soon end.
The 3-minute speech delivered in English and posted on X came days after Israeli air strikes killed Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, capping off nearly two weeks of bombings and aerial bombardments which have decapitated the Iran-backed group's leadership.
"When Iran is finally free and that moment will come a lot sooner than people think – everything will be different," Netanyahu said.
"Our two countries, Israel and Iran, will be at peace. When that day comes, the terror network that the regime built in five continents will be bankrupt, dismantled.
Netanyahu said that there was nowhere in the Middle East beyond Israel's reach, a message underscored by Israeli air attacks in Gaza, Yemen and Lebanon over the weekend.
Both Iranian and Israeli leaders have appeared to hold off from any clear pledge of direct confrontation despite the latest uptick in violence.
The response from some in the Iranian diaspora and activist community has been positive, with many sharing Netanyahu's sentiments on Iran.
"Israel and free Iran will reunite as the great allies in the Middle East again", Iranian-American activist Nick Nikbakht posted to X.
Gazelle Sharmahd, the daughter of Jamshid Sharmahd, a German-American national of Iranian descent who was kidnapped for his activism from the United Arab Emirates in 2020 by Iranian agents, thanked the Prime Minister as the "only leader of a nation who directly addresses the people of Iran."
"We agree with everything you said EXCEPT for 1 point: Those khomeinist tyrants are NOT the “leaders of Iran”!!!!" Sharmahd posted to X.
Ellie Cohanim, a former Deputy Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism during the Donald Trump administration, told Iran International that Netanyahu's speech demonstrated that Israelis and Iranians have one foe.
“(The) historic address to speak directly to the Iranian people is meant to clearly communicate to Iranians that they and Israel share a common enemy—the Islamic Republic Regime. And also to let Iranian people know that any military events and conflict are between the Regime and Israel; and not between Israel and the Iranian people.”
This was not the Israeli Prime Minister's first time addressing the people of Iran.
During an earlier premiership he spoke directly to Iranians in a 2013 an interview with BBC Persian, saying, "I would welcome a genuine rapprochement, a genuine effort to stop the nuclear program - not a fake one. Not 'harfe pooch,'" deploying a colloquial Persian phrase meaning "empty words."
Still, he was mocked for comments he made about Iranians not being able to wear jeans in the country, which some critics said showed ignorance of the way Iranians actually live.
Israel's military has long been using the social media channel IDF Farsi to speak directly to people in Iran and circumvent authorities' censorship, gaining access to tens of millions of Iranians online.
“We wanted to build a bridge to the Iranian people," Beni Sabti, the driving force behind the account, told Iran International in a previous interview.
The assassination comes from a change of approach from Israeli intelligence which has now transformed the face of the decades-long conflict with Iran’s most powerful proxy after its top ranks have been shattered by two weeks of targeted attacks across Lebanon.
The Financial Times reported that Israel has relied on exceptional intelligence in recent months, beginning with the July 30 assassination of Fuad Shukr, a key aide to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Officials told the newspaper that there had been a large-scale reorientation of Israel’s intelligence-gathering efforts on Hezbollah after the surprising failure of its far more powerful military to deliver a knockout blow against the militant group in 2006, or even to eliminate its senior leadership, including Nasrallah.
“For the next two decades, Israel’s sophisticated signals intelligence Unit 8200, and its military intelligence directorate, called Aman, mined vast amounts of data to map out the fast-growing militia in Israel’s 'northern arena,'” the paper wrote.
Speaking to Iran International, an Israeli official said that Israel is now working fast before the intervention of the US can stand in the way of its blitzing the group.
“There has to be a major amount of damage done, and quickly, before the US starts to step up pressure for a truce,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“We don’t want a repeat of Gaza where our hands are tied, limiting the success of our operations and in the end, lengthening the war.”
He said the killing of Nasrallah also marked a political change for Israel, which had in recent years acted more cautiously on the killing of the group's leader, treating him as "more like a head of state". But now, the gloves are off.
Since October 8, Hezbollah has launched over 8,000 projectiles towards Israel in allegiance with Hamas in Gaza’s atrocities of October 7. The invasion saw thousands of Iran-backed Hamas militia invade Israel killing at least 1,100 and taking over 250 hostages to Gaza, 101 of whom remain there. In Israel, 63,000 civilians have since been displaced.
Since the pager explosions which saw around 1,500 Hezbollah operatives taken out of action in Beirut, Israel has gone full force, with troops now on the ground as the country vows to create safety on its northern border in a bid to return home the residents now spread around the country.
Another Israeli official told Iran International that there is a “limited incursion” underway but did not give details beyond the fact special forces are there to dismantle key military targets in the area meant to have been demilitarized under 2006's UN Resolution 1701, a resolution Hezbollah has since continued to breach.
Speaking to the FT, Miri Eisin, a former senior intelligence officer, said Israeli intelligence had “widened its aperture to view the entirety of Hezbollah, looking beyond just its military wing to its political ambitions and growing connections with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Nasrallah’s relationship with Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad”.
It has taken 40 years for Israel to get such an upper hand, having seen the group through this time as a “terror army”. Changing this approach, Eisin told the FT that Israel was forced to study the Iran-backed militia with the same eyes as it had the likes of the Syrian army. The Syrian war for which Hezbollah lent its troops, offered the chance to see the group in a more revealing light.
The FT said that “while Hezbollah’s fighters were battle hardened in Syria’s bloody war, the militant group’s forces had grown to keep pace with the drawn-out conflict. That recruitment also left them more vulnerable to Israeli spies placing agents or looking for would-be defectors.”
According to Randa Slim, a program director at the Middle East Institute in Washington, “Syria was the beginning of the expansion of Hezbollah …. That [war] weakened their internal control mechanisms and opened the door for infiltration on a big level.”
The war in Syria also “created a fountain of data, much of it publicly available for Israel’s spies — and their algorithms — to digest”, the report noted.
Obituaries, regularly used by Hezbollah for its martyrs, were one of those vitally revealing tools, offering insights such as where the fighter was from, where he was killed, and his circle of friends posting the news on social media. Funerals also offered the chance to draw senior leaders out of the shadows, even if briefly.
Quoting a former high-ranking Lebanese politician in Beirut, the FT said the penetration of Hezbollah by Israeli or US intelligence was “the price of their support for Assad”.
“They had to reveal themselves in Syria,” he said, where the secretive group suddenly had to stay in touch and share information with the notoriously corrupt Syrian intelligence service, or with Russian intelligence services, who were regularly monitored by the Americans.
Hezbollah blew up Shin Bet’s headquarters in Tyre not once but twice in the early years of Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon. At one point in the late 1990s, Israel realized that Hezbollah was hijacking its then-unencrypted drone broadcasts, learning about the Israel Defense Forces’ own targets and methods, according to two people familiar with the issue.
Israel’s technical expertise also saw it take advantage of the likes of spy satellites, sophisticated drones and cyber-hacking capabilities that turn mobile phones into listening devices.
Israeli news outlet Ynet said that as Israel began to close in on Hezbollah, the first military intelligence used cyber technology and electronic intelligence gathering, mostly by the IDF's 8200 unit. Then the military gathered visual intelligence that could identify precise coordinates and locations and, finally, the military's 504 unit gathered information from human sources.
Intelligence agency Mossad likely laid the foundations for the entire effort in operations, Ynet said, and the details of which will likely never be revealed as Israel has a tight 50-year non disclosure rule on security information, much of which, even is locked beyond that.
Mossad has a long history of agents on the ground in Lebanon such as the high-profile case of Erika Chambers, a Mossad operative who was one of the people behind the 1979 assassination of Ali Hassan Salameh, a high-ranking official in the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Salameh was a founding member of Black September, the militant group responsible for orchestrating the attack that killed 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Chambers had entered Lebanon posing as a British charity worker and lived in an apartment overlooking a car park used by Salameh. Eventually, that lookout post would see her detonate the bomb that killed him in 1979, planted on his car by another operative, before she left the country soon after.
Today, Unit 9900, which writes algorithms that sift through terabytes of visual images to find the slightest changes, has also been key, wrote the FT, its work to identify an improvised explosive device by a roadside, a vent over a tunnel or the sudden addition of a concrete reinforcement, hinting at a bunker.
The unit identifies an operative, feeding daily patterns of movements into a vast database of information, siphoned off from devices that could include family phones, or his smart car’s odometer. These can be identified from sources as disparate as a drone flying overhead, from a hacked CCTV camera feed that he happens to pass by and even from his voice captured on the microphone of a modern TV’s remote control, according to several Israeli officials speaking to the FT.
The huge bank of information has allowed Israel to take out of action the top echelons of the group and shock the world in the wake of the pager and walkie-talkie operation in which explosives were planted in the group's communications devices just 10 days before the leader of the group was killed. In between, nearly all the group’s top commanders had been hit, along with a wealth of military infrastructure.
Now, as the Lebanese militia stands in disarray and Israel continues to pound it hard so there is no room to regroup, the Jewish state is simultaneously going hard on Iran’s Yemeni proxy, the Houthis, to make sure they are clear of the consequences of trying to step into the breach.
