APOCALYPSE NOW: IRAN IS OUT OF WATER. Will millions of water refugees go to Europe?

The last drop of water in Lake Urmia, located in Iran’s West Azerbaijan Province, has finally evaporated. In its place lies a salty desert. Urmia was once the largest saltwater lake in Iran, and one of the largest in the world. Image credit: YNet News.

• Iran has run out of water!

• This tremendous fact will change the entire planet.

• Millions will be displaced.

• Unless something even bigger happens, we will likely remember these years as Before the Iranian Water Apocalypse and After the Iranian Water Apocalypse.

• There is a good chance that many of the Iranian water refugees will end up in Europe. Others will be recruited to attack Israel.

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Why has Iran run out of water? Because jihadi terrorists—such as the ayatollahs who run Iran—cannot allow freedom, so they become autocratic central planners who meddle heavily in the economy and the environment.

Yes, free-market capitalism creates environmental problems, but central planning is so… so much worse. The diptych that captures this has Lake Ontario on the left and the Aral Sea on the right.

Lake Ontario, one of the Great Lakes of North America, and at times the most polluted, has suffered unchecked industrial pollution, sewage discharge, and agricultural runoff. It is plagued with high levels of nutrients, heavy metals, and toxic chemicals. Result: massive algal blooms, oxygen depletion, the collapse of key fish and invertebrate populations, and the arrival of invasive species like zebra mussels. Many beaches are routinely closed due to unsafe water quality. Public health is threatened by bacterial contamination and chemical exposure. There is improvement, recently, but the lake remains ecologically fragile and vulnerable to modern threats like microplastics, pharmaceuticals, etc.

The Aral Sea—once the fourth-largest freshwater lake in the world by area (though by water volume somewhat smaller than Lake Ontario)—began to shrink dramatically in the 1960s after Soviet central planners diverted its two main feeder rivers, Amu Darya and Syr Darya, to irrigate cotton fields in the surrounding Central Asian republics. As water inflow stopped, the vast inland sea began to evaporate, losing over 90% of its volume by the 2000s. The once-vast lake began splitting into smaller and mostly dry basins, and entire fishing towns were left stranded in the growing desert, boats rusting in the sand. The ecological collapse devastated local economies, caused massive dust storms laden with salt and toxic chemicals, and created severe public health crises. The exposed seabed released pollutants into the air, increasing respiratory illnesses and cancers among the population. In recent years, Kazakhstan has partially revived the North Aral Sea with a dam project—but the southern parts, especially in Uzbekistan, remain an apocalyptic wasteland.

Here’s the mnemonic: Lake Ontario is polluted—but it’s still there, and it’s getting slowly better; the Aral Sea no longer exists.

Central planning does not produce environmental problems; it produces apocalyptic wastelands—and fast. And that is what Iran is now becoming, because Iran has run out of water. That’s a literal statement.

We are about to witness one of history’s greatest humanitarian crises.

But shouldn’t we blame the drought? No…

There is certainly a drought. And it has been long. But everybody agrees that Iran would not be literally dying of thirst—even in this drought—without the disastrous central planning of the jihadi terrorists since 1979. They’ve had almost a half century to ruin Iran’s hydrology—and, with it, Iran’s ecology and economy—and they have succeeded beyond the darkest ambitions of the most psychopathic evil genius.

Source: World Resources Institute.

The World Resources Institute ranks Iran among the most water-stressed countries. But, water availability per capita aside, if we focus narrowly on the probability that water stress will lead to political collapse, then Iran is, by far, the most water-stressed country in the entire world.

Iran saw water protests in 2018, in Isfahan, Khuzestan, Bushehr, and other provinces. Again in 2021, first in Khuzestan and then nationwide. Then there were other protests that ran into 2022, and they were about many things—economic hardship, unemployment, inflation, etc.—but water scarcity was a central complaint that helped to fuel public anger. In the period March-June 2025, farmers across multiple provinces mobilized to demand their legal water rights (“Haq‑e Ab”), protest severe water scarcity, in addition to protesting the prolonged power outages affecting agriculture, delayed payments, and their collapsing livelihoods. And in May-August 2025 there was a dramatic escalation of water shortages, blackouts, and mismanagement that triggered widespread marches, sit-ins, and demonstrations—often under the slogan “Water, electricity, life – our basic right”—.

Water protests in Iran in 2021. Image credit: The New York Times.

Every one of those protests was met with repressive and lethal State firepower and produced numerous casualties. This is serious business, folks.

In the capital, Tehran, people are losing their minds with the heat, and, without water, it becomes impossible to escape it.

But how bad is it, really? A few weeks ago, on November 7th, the President of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, said this:

“If it doesn’t rain in Tehran by late November, we’ll have to ration water. And if it still doesn’t rain, we’ll have to evacuate Tehran.”¹

Government bosses, especially in autocratic States, always avoid making public statements of that nature—until the last minute. So this is the last minute. And it is now early December. No, the rains did not materialize. Yes, the Iranian government is rationing water.

A few days ago, (22 November) “Rama Habibi, deputy head of [Tehran’s] regional water authority,” said that the city’s reservoirs “are almost at a level below which the remaining volume is considered strategic and must stay in place.”² In other words, they’ll soon cease water distribution to the city.

Greater Tehran (the continuous metropolitan area) has some 15 million residents. A systemic water failure in a city of this size becomes not just a local problem, but a civilizational event: sanitation, power, food, health services—all will degrade rapidly. With such a large population, the pressure on supporting infrastructure (water supply pipelines, dams, power grids, groundwater pumping) is tremendous. When those systems break, the social-panic threshold is reached faster.

We will likely soon see great floods of desperate Iranian refugees suddenly displacing themselves in search of drinking water. This will be impossible to manage without organized State planning, but the State is what is crumbling…

The two obvious questions are:

• How did it ever get this bad?

• What will happen now?

I will tackle both questions below.

First, I will briefly explain how the ayatollah jihadi terrorists who pretend to govern Iran irreversibly ruined the environment of an entire country.

Then I will focus on the likely geopolitical structure of the humanitarian catastrophe that likely lies in our near-term future.

How did it ever get this bad?

There are a lots of good videos on YouTube explaining different aspects of Iran’s water crisis. I’ll give you the quickest summary.

The ayatollahs distrust a world dominated by ‘heretics’ and ‘infidels,’ so they tried to make themselves radically self-sufficient in food production and strategic industry. In the wisdom of paranoid central planning, this translated into a dam-building and water-diversion frenzy to irrigate deserts and supply water to key industrial facilities. As late as May 2024 Iranian government officials were still deluding themselves in public that, for Iran, a desert country, being “among top four countries in dam building” was supposedly a very good thing. A proud thing.³ But what happened was this: Iran became a country that lavishes 90% of its water on crops that are grown in the desert, some of which, selected by the jihadi central planners, are the most idiotic, water-intensive crops imaginable, such as rice and watermelons.

The hydrology of the entire country was ruined.

As surface water disappeared for many farmers and urban municipalities, everybody turned to groundwater. Iran is now pockmarked with wells. But those aquifers cannot recharge fast enough (it’s a desert).

“Iran extracts approximately 63.8 billion cubic meters of groundwater annually, while the natural rate of replenishment for these sources is only 45 billion cubic meters. This massive deficit is a deliberate policy of over-extraction that has been pursued for years, leading to the depletion of vital aquifers.”⁴

As water is pumped out, pressure drops, and the underground cavities collapse. Once that happens, those aquifers are gone for good—a long-term blow to the environment that makes the land permanently drier. And when the aquifers collapse, the ground drops. Sinkholes—some of them massive—have begun swallowing parts of Tehran.

Massive sinkhole in Tehran. Image credit: Green Prophet.

But it’s not just Tehran, all over the country, the ground is sinking, threatening infrastructure and worsening quake risks.

“One particularly unsettling incident took place just last month in Kashan, where residents posted footage of cars vanishing into gaping holes in the street. Airports, highways and even train stations have reported alarming damage. Yet despite the gravity of the situation, Iran’s leadership has responded with silence, lacking any serious or enforceable action plan.”⁵

Much of the problem can be traced to corruption—colossal corruption. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—the military organization that spreads Iranian jihadi terrorism around the world—is heavily involved with the ‘water mafia’ in Iran that builds the dams, and they make money hand over fist, not only by building the dams but also by diverting water to their own projects. These guys don’t give a damn—pun intended—about the environmental impact.⁶

Heck, they built the Gotvand Dam and ruined Khuzestan, the most water-rich province in Iran. That’s the anecdote worth a thousand explanations, because they—knowingly!—built this giant dam on a salty basin.

“An [Iranian] engineer … remarks: ‘We had done the research for the area around Gotvand dam … we knew it would directly affect the salt concentration of the water. The numbers, the research, was all there but they built it anyway.’ ”⁷

The second biggest artificial lake in the country—an environmental disaster.

Isa Kalantari, head of Iran’s Environmental Protection Agency, has publicly confessed about the Gotvand Dam: “With this one engineering mistake, we turned Khuzestan’s water salty.”⁸ And that, as you might expect, made a large contribution towards ruining agriculture in Khuzestan. Another blow to the environment was turning over the wetlands for oil extraction. And as the ecological balance was destroyed, dust storms arrived. Now Khuzestan, once considered among Iran’s greenest, most water-secure provinces, is experiencing water shortages. But how bad is it? Already ten years ago The Guardian published the following headline: ‘How Iran’s Khuzestan went from wetland to wasteland.’⁹

Wasteland.

The natural bodies of water have also become wastelands. Lake Urmia was once the largest saltwater lake in the Middle East, and among the largest in the world, but thanks in part to water diversion and dam construction it is now completely dry. In its place smolders a salty desert.

I must add, to round out my quick tale of ayatollah mismanagement, that inefficient irrigation and leaky infrastructure waste trillions of liters each year.

“UN data show Iran’s irrigation efficiency is under 40%. Much of the water is wasted through leakage, evaporation, or inefficient flood techniques. Worse, farmers still grow water-intensive crops like rice, sugar beets, and cotton in arid provinces, draining reservoirs year-round.”¹⁰

“Even as Tehran struggles with drought, one-third of the water entering its supply systems is lost to leaks and theft before reaching consumers.”¹¹

The ayatollahs are so fanatical about destroying Israel that they can’t invest a little money to improve efficiency in irrigation or to repair leaky pipes. If only they had done that—just that—they could have avoided “day zero”: the moment when Tehran’s taps go dry. But now it’s too late. This moment is coming. It is near.

And it spells Apocalypse.

What will happen now?

Iran faces an imminent and potentially civilization-threatening water crisis. With over 80% of its water resources already depleted, aquifers collapsing, rivers running dry, and rainfall patterns shifting unfavorably, the country is on a path to ecological and economic implosion.

The water crisis severely impacts electricity production, as the country depends heavily on water for both hydroelectric generation and for cooling thermal power plants. Falling reservoir levels have slashed hydro output—normally around 15% of the energy mix—and thermal plants struggle when water for cooling is scarce. Meanwhile, heatwaves and droughts spike electricity demand, worsening blackouts and rationing. There have been widespread outages across cities and industries. As electricity fails due to lack of water, you can’t pump any water to consumers.

As the feedback loop tightens, experts warn Iran is heading toward a dual collapse of its water and energy systems.

Catastrophe is not speculative, but imminent. When the water truly runs out, Iran will face not just economic collapse, but a population displacement of historic proportions.

Desperate Iranians will probably displace themselves internally from the parched areas of central and southern Iran to the West and Northwest in search of drinking water. But will the regime allow it?

Already there have been ethnic tensions over water diversion. And the water refugees are going to be mostly ethnic Persians moving from the dry provinces in center and southern Iran to the relatively water-rich provinces in the West and Northwest, populated by ethnic minorities already resentful that their environment has been ruined to send water to the Persian majority. This is a powder keg ready to explode.

There is also the danger that angry water refugees and water protesters will coalesce into a revolutionary uprising to unseat the government. The regime may not survive that.

For these reasons, perhaps we should expect the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—assuming the regime survives in the short term—to try and manage the flow of Iranian water refugees into Iraq. This has several advantages for the ayatollah regime:

1. Iran already imposes itself on the fragmented Iraqi central government via Iranian-linked Shiite militias, so Iraq offers the most permissive route for mass movement.¹²

2. Iraq’s southern river systems—though stressed—offer more surface water than any part of central or southeastern Iran. The Euphrates and Tigris rivers are critical lifelines. Even if overstretched, they represent hope compared to the dying Iranian interior. And they may prove sufficient for the short-term goal of managing the immediate humanitarian crisis.

3. The water refugees can perhaps be made to flow toward Iraq through Khuzestan and Kermanshah, as these corridors are already dominated by IRGC-controlled militias and infrastructure.

In this scenario, which I think the IRGC will attempt, the strategy will be to treat Iraq as a buffer zone, using Shiite militia-controlled territory to absorb millions of fleeing Iranians.

There are no guarantees, here, but if they can pull this off it will slow regime destabilization in Iran, delaying full collapse by redirecting domestic pressure abroad. But that pressure will quickly destabilize Iraq, which is also water stressed. What then?

I think at this point the only move left will be to encourage the desperate refugees to try for the next border. Some may try for the borders of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, but if the human waves arriving at these borders are large enough, these Muslim states will quickly militarize their borders to keep the refugees out. We may see massacres.

The western, then northern route through Syria to Turkey may prove less perilous. After all, the new ‘government’ in Damascus is that of Al Jolani, a client of Turkey’s Erdogan. And the Al Jolani and Turkish stronghold in Syria is Idlib, which borders Turkey.

During the height of the Syrian civil war, millions of Syrian refugees moved through Turkey into Europe, and Turkey’s jihadi president Recep Tayyip Erdogan even used his ability to flood Europe with refugees as a threat in negotiations with the European Union to get more of what he wanted. The infrastructure, political mechanisms, and smuggling networks for moving these people through Turkey are all still in place. And since Erdogan is obviously on the full jihadi path, he can accelerate the destruction of Europe by sending this next great Muslim wave crashing into European society.

Of course, along the way, as they pass through Syria, many of these Iranians will be retained, pressed into service to join the ranks of the Houthis, now streaming into Syria to prepare the next great attack on Israel.¹³

Expect the Western bosses to collaborate with all of this.

1. Associated Press. (2025, November 7). Iranian capital faces water rationing and evacuations if it doesn’t rain soon, president warns. AP News.
https://apnews.com/article/iran-president-water-crisis-rain-evacuation-da5f9ccd264d525ed16aa53ea76dcf8a

2. Iran International. (2025, November 22). Iran’s deepening water crisis nears critical levels in major cities. Iran International.
https://www.iranintl.com/en/202511227008

3. Tehran Times. (2024, May 20). Iran among top four countries in dam building: energy minister. Tehran Times.
https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/498756/Iran-among-top-four-countries-in-dam-building-energy-minister

4. Mohammadi, S. S. (2025, November 14). Iran’s Water Bankruptcy: A Crisis Manufactured by IRGC Corruption, Not Climate. NCRI.
https://www.ncr-iran.org/en/news/economy/irans-water-bankruptcy-a-crisis-manufactured-by-irgc-corruption-not-climate/

5. Ynet News. (2025, June 23). Iran battles a quiet disaster as land sinks beneath its feet. By Yogev Israeli.
https://www.ynetnews.com/environment/article/hjxbk6sele

6. Mohammadi, S. S. (2025, November 14). Iran’s Water Bankruptcy: A Crisis Manufactured by IRGC Corruption, Not Climate. NCRI.
https://www.ncr-iran.org/en/news/economy/irans-water-bankruptcy-a-crisis-manufactured-by-irgc-corruption-not-climate/

7. Tehran Bureau. (2015, April 16). How Iran’s Khuzestan went from wetland to wasteland. The Guardian.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/iran-blog/2015/apr/16/iran-khuzestan-environment-wetlands-dust-pollution

8. Mirzakhani, A. (2018, July 16). Gotvand Dam: An Environmental Disaster. IranWire.
https://iranwire.com/en/features/65407/

9. Tehran Bureau. (2015, April 16). How Iran’s Khuzestan went from wetland to wasteland. The Guardian.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/iran-blog/2015/apr/16/iran-khuzestan-environment-wetlands-dust-pollution

10. BakuNetwork.org. (2025, November 12). Burnt‑Out Stability: Iran Trapped by Its Own Eco‑Catastrophe. BakuNetwork.org.
https://www.bakunetwork.org/en/news/analytics/14947

11. Michel, D., Todman, W., & Jun, J. (2025, November 25). Satellite imagery shows Tehran’s accelerating water crisis. Center for Strategic and International Studies.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/satellite-imagery-shows-tehrans-accelerating-water-crisis

12. Caroline Rose over at the New Lines Institute explains:

“[Iranian-backed] PMF control of Iraqi transnational highways, military bases, and border patrol posts have allowed [the pro-Iranian] militias [in Iraq] to assist in Iranian smuggling networks and generate independent revenue streams outside of $2.16 billion in federal funding. Iran-backed militias are also politically cushioned by the Fatah alliance in the Iraqi parliament and extensive positive media coverage among Iraq’s more than 100 outlets.

Iran may not have a monopoly over Iraq’s institutions, but its influence in Baghdad is powerful. Tehran-aligned Shiite groups play a dynamic role in exacerbating gridlock, fragmentation, and paralysis for any government wishing to create a more autonomous Iraq. Baghdad’s institutional authority over Iran-supported militias remains only on paper as the government struggles to regulate militia activity.”

SOURCE: Rose, C. (2020, August 12). Iraq: Caught between the U.S., Iran and itself. New Lines Institute.
https://newlinesinstitute.org/political-systems/governance/iraq-caught-between-the-u-s-iran-and-itself/

13. Mansharof, Y. (2025, November 30). Israel must halt Houthi infiltration into Syria as Iran plans another multi‑front war. The Jerusalem Post.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-876716