ISIS using Water as a Weapon in Iraq

The Islamic State militants who have rampaged across northern Iraq are increasingly using water as a weapon, cutting off supplies to villages resisting their rule and pressing to expand their control over the country’s water infrastructure.

The threat from the jihadists is so critical that US forces are bombing the militants close to both the Mosul and Haditha dams — Iraq’s largest — on a near-daily basis. But the radical Islamists continue to menace both facilities.

The Sunni militants want to seize the dams to bolster their claim they are building an actual state; the dams are key to irrigating the country’s vast wheat fields and providing Iraqis with electricity. More ominously, the Islamic State has used its control over water facilities — including as many as four dams along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers — to displace communities or deprive them of crucial water supplies.

The Islamic State ‘‘understands how powerful water is as a tool, and they are not afraid to use it,’’ said Michael Stephens, a Middle East specialist and deputy director of the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based security studies think tank.

‘‘A lot of effort has been expended to control resources in Iraq in a way not seen in other conflicts,’’ he added.

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Water has long played a role in armed struggle, from the Allied bombing of German dams during World War II to Saddam Hussein’s draining of Iraq’s southern marshes in the 1990s to punish residents for an antigovernment rebellion.

But the idea of a radical, nonstate group gaining authority over critical water infrastructure has raised particular worry. The White House was so alarmed in August when Islamic State fighters briefly seized the Mosul Dam — located on the Tigris River that runs through Baghdad — that it backed a major operation by Iraqi and Kurdish forces to wrest it back.

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