Qosh Tepa Canal Qush Tepa

Background:
Afghanistan is rapidly building an enormous canal to draw water from the Amudarya River. This has the potential to affect the water availability situation to Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

The Qosh Tepa Canal, named after the Qosh Tepa district in the Jawzjan province, will be 285km in length and 100 meters in width. It will help irrigate 550000 hectares of land (1.35 million acre, or 5500 square kilometers).

The Taliban said that at present some 5500 people are working simultaneously at about 120 locations to speed up the work. More than 3300 units of machinery are in use. More than 200 local companies are working as sub-contractors under the supervision of the Afghanistan National Development Company.

The Taliban are doing the first phase of the project, which is 100km in length, from their own revenues. The cost of the first phase is about USD 91 million.

For the subsequent two phases, they will generate funds from the selling of mines, particularly the Dar-e-Souph Mine.

The canal will have the capacity to carry 650 cusec (cubic meters per second) of water, feeding the lands in the Balkh, Jawzjan, and Faryab provinces. Of these, Jawzjan and Faryab provinces border with Turkmenistan.

More than half the work on the first phase has been completed and this 100km phase will be ready by June 2023, some two months ahead of the schedule.

The Economist reports that the project is not new. Plans for a canal in north Afghanistan had been discussed for decades; feasibility studies were carried out under its former American-backed government. Even so, the Taliban’s progress looks impressive. Satellite imagery supplied by Planet Labs, pbc, an American firm, reveals that over 100km of canal has been excavated in the past 10 months.
So, shortly after the construction of the canal is finished in 2028, some 20% of the water in the Amu-Darya, starting from the point just west of the Tajik-Uzbek border, will be diverted into the Qosh Tepa canal.(20260401)
 

Director of Amu Darya in the northern zone:
Mawlavii Abdul Hakeem Hikmat (20230327)

Background:
Initial plans for the canal to be built with Soviet assistance date back to the 1970s. This did not happen. In 2018, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) commissioned a feasibility study for the project, and the Ghani government built the first seven kilometers of the canal before being thrown out of power in August 2021 by the Taliban, a group now referred to in official parlance as the “interim authorities of Afghanistan.” The planned canal is 287 kilometers long and 8.5 meters deep, with an average width of 100 meters (The canal’s width starts at 152 meters and gradually decreases to sixty-four meters at the end. Thus, the average width can be said to be roughly 100 meters). It is expected to open more than 1.2 million acres of farmland and create about 200,000 new jobs. Construction of the main canal, involving up to 5,000 workers and 4,000 earth movers and trucks, is progressing rapidly and has entered its second phase. Most reports speak of a six-year timetable for canal creation. However, only 49 percent of the total land available in the surrounding area is estimated to be arable; hence, the actual annual water extraction would be around 6.37 bcm. But analyzing these numbers, and excluding nonarable lands such as saline and sand dune-dominated lands, it appears that the Qoshtepa Canal might divert 8–17 percent of water from the Amu Darya, which is lower than the earlier and most quoted estimate of 20 percent.