Jordanian anti-narcotics authorities thwart smuggling attempt on border with Syria

TANGIER: Sun-baked Morocco, grappling with its worst drought in decades, has launched a pilot project aimed at slowing water evaporation while simultaneously generating green energy using floating solar panels.

At a major reservoir near the northern city of Tangier, thousands of so-called “floatovoltaic” panels protect the water’s surface from the blazing sun and absorb its light to generate electricity.

Authorities plan to power the neighboring Tanger Med port complex with the resulting energy, and if it proves a success, the technology could have far wider implications for the North African country.

According to official figures, Morocco’s water reserves lost the equivalent of more than 600 Olympic-sized swimming pools every day to evaporation between October 2022 and September 2023.

Over that same period, temperatures averaged 1.8C higher than normal, meaning water evaporated at a higher rate.

Alongside other factors like declining rainfall, this has reduced reservoirs nationwide to about one-third of their capacity.

Water Ministry official Yassine Wahbi said the Tangier reservoir loses around 3,000 cubic meters a day to evaporation, but that figure more than doubles in the hot summer months.

The floating photovoltaic panels can help cut evaporation by about 30 percent, he said.

The ministry has said the floating panels represent “an important gain in a context of increasingly scarce water resources,” even if the evaporation they stop is, for now, relatively marginal.

Assessment studies are underway for another two similar projects in Oued El-Makhazine, at one of Morocco’s largest dams in the north, and in Lalla Takerkoust near Marrakech.

Similar technology is being tested in France, Indonesia and Thailand, while China already operates some of the world’s largest floating solar farms.

Since the Moroccan pilot program began late last year, more than 400 floating platforms supporting several thousand panels have been installed.

The government wants more, planning to reach 22,000 panels that would cover about 10 hectares at the 123-hectare Tangier reservoir.

Once completed, the system would generate roughly 13 megawatts of electricity — enough to power the Tanger Med complex.

Authorities also have plans to plant trees along the banks of the reservoir to reduce winds, believed to exacerbate evaporation.

Climate science Prof. Mohammed-Said Karrouk called it a “pioneering” project.

He noted, however, that the reservoir is too large and its surface too irregular to cover completely with floating panels, which could be damaged with fluctuating water levels.

Official data shows water reserves fed by rainfall have fallen by nearly 75 percent in the past decade compared with the 1980s, dropping from an annual average of 18 billion cubic meters to only five.

Morocco has so far mainly relied on desalination to combat shortages, producing about 320 million cubic meters of potable water a year.

Authorities aim to expand production to 1.7 billion cubic meters yearly by 2030.

Karrouk said an urgent priority should be transferring surplus water from northern dams to regions in central and southern Morocco that are more impacted by the years-long drought.

The country already has a system dubbed the “water highway” — a 67-kilometer canal linking the Sebou basin to the capital Rabat — with plans to expand the network to other dams.

KHARTOUM: Shelling by Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces killed at least seven people and wounded 71 others in El-Fasher, a medical source said Sunday, as the paramilitary group launched its fiercest offensive yet on the besieged city.

El-Fasher, the last major city in the vast western Darfur region still under army control, has become the most violent front line in the war between the Sudanese army and the RSF, which erupted in April 2023.

In recent weeks, paramilitary forces have escalated their long-running siege, launching fierce artillery barrages and ground incursions into densely populated neighborhoods, the city’s airport and the famine-hit Abu Shouk displacement camp.

The few hospitals still operational have been repeatedly bombarded and the local police headquarters captured by the RSF.

The medical source, who requested anonymity for safety reasons, said the true toll from Saturday’s attack was “likely higher,” as many injured had been unable to reach the hospital due to the intensity of the RSF’s strikes.

Among the wounded, mostly suffering from shrapnel injuries, 22 were reported to be in a critical condition, according to the source, who was reached via satellite Internet to bypass a communications blackout.

Local activists said the attack struck several neighborhoods in the city’s west near the airport, which RSF forces have sought to capture.

The RSF, which evolved from the Janjaweed Arab militias accused of genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s, is seeking to wrest full control of the region from the army after being pushed out of the capital Khartoum earlier this year.

Satellite imagery from Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab revealed Thursday that the RSF had constructed more than 31 kilometers of berms — raised earth barriers — “creating a literal kill box” in the city, the report said.

Its imagery also identified munitions impact damage at the city’s water authority, which supplies El-Fasher with fresh drinking water.

Nathaniel Raymond, the lab’s executive director, said the RSF had confined the Sudanese army and its allied militias to less than five square kilometers in the city.

“It’s the smallest it’s been since the siege began,” he told AFP.

The besieged population — estimated by the UN at some 300,000 — has endured severe shortages of water and food for over a year, according to humanitarian workers.

Famine was officially declared in three displacement camps around El-Fasher last year, and the UN warned it could spread to the city itself by last May.

A lack of data has so far prevented an official declaration of famine, but the UN estimates that nearly 40 percent of children under five are acutely malnourished, with 11 percent severely so.

Many have resorted to eating animal fodder, while desperate attempts to escape into the desert often end in death from exposure, starvation or violence.

“The pattern of life is ending,” said Raymond.

“They are dying in poverty, crossfire and bombardment and they’re being killed as they’re trying to leave,” he added.

Yale’s satellite images show that cemeteries had been expanded over the past months.

“The most worrisome part will be when there’s no one left to dig the graves anymore.”

The RSF, which recently announced the formation of a parallel government in the region, would control all five Darfur state capitals if it were to successfully capture El-Fasher.

Experts have warned that the city’s non-Arab Zaghawa tribe may face a similar fate to the non-Arab Massalit tribe in West Darfur’s state capital of El-Geneina, where UN experts found up to 15,000 people, mostly from the tribe, were killed in 2023 massacres blamed on RSF forces.

Both warring sides have been accused of war crimes, but the RSF has, in particular, been accused of genocide, sexual violence and systematic looting.

In the early 2000s, the paramilitary force led a government-orchestrated campaign of ethnic cleansing against non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur, killing an estimated 300,000 people.

“The Janjaweed are about to win the entire genocide that began in the early 21st century,” Raymond said.

“And the world isn’t going to do anything about it.”