​Trump Is Playing War Crime Roulette With the Livability of the Persian Gulf

In the midst of this week’s round of strikes and counterstrikes between the Trump administration and Iran, Iran’s IRIB News reported that on Tuesday the US had struck a reservoir and a water tank serving the inland town of Kuhestak as well as the port of Sirik on the Persian Gulf Coast.

Sirik is a small town of a few thousand inhabitants that serves as the capital for Sirik district of Hormozgan Province. It is not far from Bandar Abbas, the capital of the province. There is allegedly a base of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps at Sirik, which is likely why the town was targeted. (H/t to BBC Monitoring for some of these Iran media links.)

If, however, the strike on the water tanks was deliberate, it was a war crime. Iranian media alleged that it deprived 20,000 people of drinking water in 113°F (45°C) temperatures and 60% humidity. This affected men, women, and children. The reservoir held 70K cubic feet of water and the water tank 17K cubic feet. Drinking water was unavailable for 12 hours.

Fatemeh Jarareh, the female representative in parliament of Hormozgan Province, called the attack a “blatant war crime against humanity.” She accused what she called the “terrorist army” of the United States of deliberately targeting key infrastructure necessary to human life and livelihood.

Quite apart from the question of whether it is a war crime to hit civilian water facilities, it is a very dangerous move.

The government said that repair crews restored water transmission lines in 12 hours and said that over the following 24 hours drinking water would stabilize.

During the 39-day all-out war in March, Iran asserted that the US or Israelis had damaged a desalinization plant providing drinking water to residents. Bahrain likewise said that a desalinization plant providing water to 30 villages had been damaged by an Iranian drone.

Quite apart from the question of whether it is a war crime to hit civilian water facilities, it is a very dangerous move. If Iran felt its inhabitants were systematically being deprived of water, it could likely take out all the desalization plants in the territories of its Arab Gulf neighbors, without which none of those countries could survive more than three days. That is how long it takes for renal failure from lack of water to kick in and kill you; it is why rescue teams after an earthquake gradually stop searching in the rubble for survivors after 36 hours, since the likelihood of someone surviving longer than that without water is low.

Some 80% of water in the United Arab Emirates, a country of 11 million, comes from desalinization plants. Their total destruction would provoke a vast exodus of the population and raise questions about the survival of the country, where 88% of the residents are non-citizen migrant workers and expatriates. In turn, the Emirates’ ability to export petroleum would be drastically impeded, hurting the whole world.

Hence, the Trump administration should think long and hard before hitting such civilian infrastructure in Iran. The whole Gulf region is full of glass houses, and if they are all shattered, the energy crisis would be unprecedented.