I small Serageldin, then vice- president of the World Bank, summed up a view on water that had come to the fore when he was reported in the New York Times in 1995 as saying 'the wars of the next century will be about water'. Such sentiments followed, for example, publication in 1993 of a book 'Water wars ― coming conflicts in the Middle East' written by John Bullock and Adel Darwish. This explored three high-profile river systems ― the Nile, Jordan and Tigris-Euphrates. The warning from the authors was that there was both a precedent of an upstream country stopping the flow of a river into a downstream country, citing the example of the Euphrates, when Turkey began filling its Ataturk Dam in 1980, as well as a precedent of a country using force over water, for which the authors cited Israel.
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