BEIRUT: Residents of Damascus are scrambling for clean water after the government attacked rebels holding the city’s main source in a nearby valley, leading to an accidental outage that has stretched on for nearly two weeks.
Syrian government forces pressed their offensive in the water-rich valley northwest of the capital Tuesday as 10 rebel groups announced they are suspending talks about planned peace negotiations because of what they described as government violations of a cease-fire deal.
The truce, brokered by Russia and Turkey, is meant to be followed by talks later this month in the Kazakh capital of Astana between mainstream rebel factions and government representatives.
The water cutoff is a major challenge to the government’s effort throughout the nearly 6-year-old civil war to keep the capital as insulated as possible from the effects of the conflict tearing apart much of the country.
“I have stopped cleaning the house, washing dishes or clothes. We no longer take showers,” said Mona Maqssoud, a 50-year-old resident of Damascus. She said residents have relied on water tankers that come by occasionally and give 5 gallons of water to each house, but that hasn’t been enough.
“We begged the drivers [to return] to our neighborhood, but they refused.”
The cutoff, since Dec. 22, is the longest Damascus has seen, say residents, who are accustomed to intermittent outages.
The opposition has long controlled Wadi Barada, the valley northwest of Damascus through which the river of the same name flows to the capital. The Barada River and its source, the Ain al-Fijeh spring, supply 70 percent of the water for the Damascus area.
The government and the opposition had previously had an understanding to keep water services running. But that ended when forces of President Bashar Assad and his allies, the Lebanon Hezbollah guerrilla force, attacked the valley, home to some 100,000 people.
The two sides blame each other for the cutoff.
An activist-run media collective in the Barada Valley said government and Russian aircraft had bombed the Ain el-Fijeh water processing facility, puncturing its fuel depots and contaminating the water stream. The collective said the plant’s electrical control systems had been destroyed as well. Images showed the roof of the facility collapsed into its main water basin.
An activist with the group, Abu Mohammed al-Bardawi, said it would take at least two months to get the facilities working again.