World
Swallowed by the sea, Pakistan’s Indus delta now threatened by canals

Thatta, Pakistan – On a sunny afternoon at Dando Jetty, a small fishing village in Pakistan’s sprawling Indus Delta, a boat is being unloaded and another is about to leave for the Arabian Sea.
The melodious voice of Sindhi folk singer Fouzia Soomro rises from a loudspeaker playing on a nearby parked boat.
About 130km (81 miles) from Pakistan’s largest city of Karachi, Dando Jetty sits on the bank of Khobar Creek, one of the two surviving creeks of the Indus River in Thatta, a coastal district in the eastern Sindh province.
“There should be freshwater in this creek, flowing into the sea,” Zahid Sakani tells Al Jazeera as he embarks on a boat to visit his ancestral village, Haji Qadir Bux Sakani, in Kharo Chan, a sub-district of Thatta, three hours away. “Instead, it’s seawater.”
Six years ago, Sakani, 45, used to be a farmer. But his land, along with the rest of Haji Qadir Bux Sakani village, was swallowed by the sea, forcing him to migrate to Baghan, 15km (nine miles) from Dando Jetty, and turn to tailoring for survival.
Now, the Kharo Chan port wears a deserted look – no human beings in sight, stray dogs roam freely, and abandoned boats outnumber those that are still in service. Sakani sometimes goes to Kharo Chan to visit the graves of his father and other ancestors.
“We cultivated 200 acres [81 hectares] of land and raised livestock here,” said Sakani as he stood at the port. “But all were lost to the sea.”
Kharo Chan was once a prosperous area comprising of 42 “dehs” (villages), of which only three now exist. The rest were submerged into the sea, forcing thousands of people to migrate to other villages or Karachi city.
According to the government census, Kharo Chan’s population shrunk from 26,000 in 1988 to 11,403 in 2023.
It was not only Kharo Chan that met this fate. In the past decade, dozens of villages in the Indus Delta have disappeared, swallowed by the advancing sea.
New canal projects
And now, a new threat has emerged in an already fragile ecosystem.
As part of a so-called Green Pakistan Initiative, the Pakistan government is seeking $6bn investment from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain over the next three to five years for corporate farming, aiming to cultivate 1.5 million acres (600,000 hectares) of barren land, and mechanise the existing 50 million acres (20 million hectares) of agricultural land across the country.
The project aims to irrigate a total of 4.8 million acres (1.9 million hectares) of barren land by constructing six canals – two each in Sindh, Balochistan, and Punjab provinces. Five of those canals will be on the Indus, while the sixth will be constructed along the Sutlej River to irrigate the Cholistan Desert in Pakistan’s most populous Punjab province.
According to the 1960 Indus Water Treaty, a World Bank-brokered water distribution agreement between India and Pakistan, the waters of the Sutlej primarily belong to India. It is one of the five rivers that originate in India and fall into the Indus in Pakistan. Along with the Sutlej, the waters of the Ravi and Beas Rivers also belong to India under the treaty, while the waters of the Chenab and Jhelum, apart from Indus itself are Pakistan’s.
However, the Sutlej does bring water to Pakistan during the monsoons in India, with Cholistan historically reliant on rainfall for irrigation.
“They will divert water from Indus to Sutlej through Chenab and then to Cholistan canal,” said Obhayo Khushuk, a former irrigation engineer. “You cannot build a new irrigation system depending on [monsoon] floodwater.”
Meanwhile, corporate farming has already begun in Cholistan under the Green Pakistan Initiative, with the authorities approving 4,121 cusecs of water to irrigate 0.6 million acres (24,000 hectares) of land in the Cholistan Desert – an area larger than Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city.
Mohammad Ehsan Leghari, Sindh’s representative in the Indus River System Authority (IRSA), a regulatory body established in 1992 to oversee the allocation of water to Pakistan’s four provinces, strongly opposed the move.
“From 1999 to 2024, not a single year has passed without water shortage in Pakistan, with Sindh and Balochistan provinces facing up to 50 percent water scarcity during the summer. In this situation, where will the water for the proposed canal system come from?” he asked.
In a letter to the Council of Common Interest (CCI), a constitutional body authorised to resolve issues between the federal government and provinces, the Sindh government also criticised the project, saying that IRSA had no right to issue certificates of water availability. CCI is headed by the prime minister, with the chief ministers of the four provinces and three federal ministers as its members.
Sindh’s Irrigation Minister Jam Khan Shoro warned the Cholistan canal would “turn Sindh barren”. However, federal Planning and Development Minister Ahsan Iqbal said that the Sindh government’s objections were “baseless” as new canals would not affect its share of water.
But Hassan Abbas, an Islamabad-based independent water and environment consultant, calls the Cholistan canal an “unscientific” project. According to him, building a canal system needs even and steady land, not sand dunes as present in Cholistan.
“Water does not know how to climb a sand dune,” Abbas said.
The delta’s destruction
The mighty Indus River has been flowing for thousands of years and once cradled one of the earliest known human civilisations spread across modern Pakistan, Afghanistan and India.
But as the British colonised the subcontinent two centuries ago, they also engineered the river, building dams and diverting its course. After independence in 1947, the same colonial policies were followed by successive governments, as more barrages, dams and canals led to the destruction of the Indus Delta – the fifth largest in the world.
“A delta is made up of sand, silt and water. The process of the destruction of the Indus Delta began back in 1850 when the Britishers established a canal network. Every canal built in Pakistan, India or China since contributed to the destruction of the Indus Delta,” Abbas told Al Jazeera. The Indus originates from the Chinese-controlled Tibet region, where China has built a dam on the river.

According to a 2019 study by the US-Pakistan Center for Advanced Studies in Water, the Indus Delta was spread over 13,900 square kilometres (5,367sq miles) in 1833, but shrunk to just 1,067sq km (412sq miles) in 2018 – a 92 percent decline in its original area.
“A delta is like an open hand and its creeks are its fingers that fall into the sea,” Sakani said. “The space between those fingers is home to millions of people, animals and other creatures, but it is rapidly shrinking.”
As more and more land got degraded, residents were forced to migrate upstream. But not everyone could afford to move. Those who remained in the Delta switched from farming to other professions, mainly fishing.
Sidique Katiar, 55, a resident of Haji Yousif Katiar village near Dando Jetty, became a fisherman some 15 years ago.
“I remember there used to be only a few boats in our village. Now, every household has boats [and] the number of fisherfolk is growing day by day,” he told Al Jazeera.
Loss of livelihood
At Sanhiri Creek along the Arabian Sea, a seven-hour boat journey from Dando Jetty, about a dozen makeshift huts are inhabited by the so-called “fishing labourers”.
Nathi Mallah, 50, a resident of Joho village in Thatta’s Keti Bandar area, is one of them. She shoves a small iron rod into a jar of salt and then inserts it into the sandy ground. She waits briefly before pulling the rod back, quickly grabbing a small aquatic creature locally known as “maroarri” (razor shell in English), because of its long, narrow and rectangular shape, resembling an old-fashioned razor.
Mallah works with her husband and six children to catch “maroarri”, which the fisherfolks say is only exported to China. None of Mallah’s children go to school as the family works for 10-12 hours a day for a local contractor, who provides them some salt and drinking water.
Marroarri sells for 42 Pakistani rupees (15 US cents) a kilo and each member of the Mallah family collects about 8-10kg daily, earning them enough to survive. Nathi entered the business some five years ago when their fishing profession in Joho went into losses.
Muhammad Sadique Mallah, Nathi’s husband, says increasing land degradation pushed people to switch from farming to fishing. “There are more fishermen on the sea than there used to be in my youth,” the 55-year-old told Al Jazeera.
A 2019 report by the World Bank says catches of fish dwindled from 5,000 tonnes a year in 1951 to a meagre 300 tonnes now due to the Indus Delta’s degradation, forcing Pakistan to face a loss of $2bn annually.
“There was a time when our men would go to the sea and return in 10 days,” said Nathi. “Now they don’t come back even after a month.”
No water for crops
Allah Bux Kalmati, 60, lives in Dando Jetty where he cultivates tomato, chilli, some vegetables, and betel leaves. He says freshwater is only available during the two months of the monsoon season.
But Kalmati’s betel-leaf garden needs water every two weeks. “It has now been a month and there is no water for the plants,” he says.
According to the Water Apportionment Accord (WAA) of 1991, an agreement between Pakistan’s four provinces on sharing water, at least 10 million acre feet (MAF) of water has to be discharged annually down the Kotri Barrage, the last diversion on Indus, for the downstream deltaic ecosystem.
In 1991, the Switzerland-based International Union for Conservation for Nature, however, recommended a release of 27MAF annually – a goal that could never be materialised. Moreover, IRSA data showed that water flow was less than 10MAF during 12 of the past 25 years because officials diverted it elsewhere before it reached the sea.
“Ten MAF water is not enough for Indus Delta. It received 180 to 200MAF water annually before the canal system and it requires the same amount of water to survive,” said researcher Abbas as he attributed the water shortage to dams and barrages.
“We have 10 percent more water than the last century. But building canal after canal has diverted the flow of water, resulting in waterlogging upstream and sedimentation in the dams,” he said.
Mahmood Nawaz Shah, president of a growers’ association in Sindh, said Pakistan’s irrigation system has become “old and outdated”. “Our average grain production stands at 130 grams per cubic metre while it is 390 grams in neighbouring India,” he said.
Shah explained that instead of expanding the irrigation system, Pakistan needs to fix the existing water network and better manage the resource. “Pakistan utilises 90 percent of its water in agriculture, while the world’s usage is 75 percent maximum,” he said, citing an International Water Management Institute study.
“There are areas where canals are available but water doesn’t reach when required. Take for example the Indus Delta. You don’t have water for the existing cultivable lands. Pakistan should learn how to save water and increase its production.”
Back at Dando Jetty, Sakani has just returned after visiting his ancestral village in Kharo Chan. Before heading home, he wanted to buy some fresh fish at Dando, but no boat had arrived from the sea that day.
“There was a time when we would distribute palla [hilsa herring] among the beggars,” he said. “But now, we can’t get fish at this place.”
Meanwhile, the high tide makes Khobar Creek look like the sea, now only 7-8km (4-5 miles) from Baghan, Sakani’s new hometown.
“The sea was 14-15km [8-9 miles] away when we shifted here from Kharo Chan,” he told Al Jazeera. “If there is no freshwater left downstream, the sea will continue to erode the land and, in the next 15 years, Baghan, too, will perish. We will have to move again to another place.
“More canals and impediments to Indus River would completely block the flow of water into the sea. It will be the final nail in the coffin of the Indus Delta.”

World
YouTube to start bringing back creators banned for COVID-19 and election misinformation
NEW YORK (AP) — YouTube will offer creators a way to rejoin the streaming platform if they were banned for violating COVID-19 and election misinformation policies that are no longer in effect, its parent company Alphabet said Tuesday.
In a letter submitted in response to subpoenas from the House Judiciary Committee, attorneys for Alphabet said the decision to bring back banned accounts reflected the company’s commitment to free speech. It said the company values conservative voices on its platform and recognizes their reach and important role in civic discourse.
“No matter the political atmosphere, YouTube will continue to enable free expression on its platform, particularly as it relates to issues subject to political debate,” the letter read.
The move is the latest in a cascade of content moderation rollbacks from tech companies, who cracked down on false information during the pandemic and after the 2020 election but have since faced pressure from President Donald Trump and other conservatives who argue they unlawfully stifled right-wing voices in the process.
It comes as tech CEOs, including Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, have sought a closer relationship with the Republican president, including through high-dollar donations to his campaign and attending events in Washington.
YouTube in 2023 phased out its policy to remove content that falsely claims the 2020 election, or other past U.S. presidential elections, were marred by “widespread fraud, errors or glitches.”
The platform in 2024 also retired its standalone COVID-19 content restrictions, allowing various treatments for the disease to be discussed. COVID-19 misinformation now falls under YouTube’s broader medical misinformation policy.
Among the creators who have been banned from YouTube under the now-expired policies are prominent conservative influencers, including Dan Bongino, who now serves as deputy director of the FBI. For people who make money on social media, access to monetization on YouTube can be significant, earning them large sums through ad revenue.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan and other congressional Republicans have pressured tech companies to reverse content moderation policies created under former President Joe Biden and accused Biden’s administration of unfairly wielding its power over the companies to chill lawful online speech.
In Tuesday’s letter, Alphabet’s lawyers said senior Biden administration officials “conducted repeated and sustained outreach” to coerce the company to remove pandemic-related YouTube videos that did not violate company policies.
“It is unacceptable and wrong when any government, including the Biden Administration, attempts to dictate how the Company moderates content, and the Company has consistently fought against those efforts on First Amendment grounds,” the letter said.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also accused the Biden administration of pressuring employees to inappropriately censor content during the COVID-19 pandemic. Elon Musk, the owner of the social platform X, has accused the FBI of illegally coercing Twitter before his tenure to suppress a story about Hunter Biden.
The Supreme Court last year sided with former President Joe Biden’s administration in a dispute with Republican-led states over how far the federal government can go to combat controversial social media posts on topics including COVID-19 and election security.
Asked for more information about the reinstatement process, a spokesperson for YouTube did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
World
Syria’s new president takes center stage at UNGA as concerns linger over terrorist past

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Once a member of al Qaeda and the Islamic State and now leading Syria’s fragile transition since toppling the Bashar Assad regime, Ahmed al-Sharaa is ready to take to the global center stage at the United Nations General Assembly Wednesday and make his case for a new path forward for his war-torn nation.
“This marks the first participation in high-level meetings of a Syrian president at the United Nations General Assembly since 1967, so this is a very big deal,” Natasha Hall, senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Fox News Digital.
“On such a historic occasion, what he will try to emphasize and underline is that this is a new day for Syria. They have overthrown the brutal dictatorship of the Assad regime. He will talk about the progress that’s been made and what more progress needs to happen in terms of recognition and the lifting of U.N. sanctions to help Syria move forward,” Hall added.
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Interim Syria President Ahmed al-Sharaa speaks during the Concordia Annual Summit in New York, Monday, Sept. 22, 2025. (Photo/Andres Kudacki)
A high-ranking Syrian government official confirmed to Fox News Digital that al-Sharaa will use the opportunity at the U.N. to present Syria’s vision for stability, reconstruction, and reconciliation.
“The most important issues he will raise include the need to lift all forms of unilateral sanctions that continue to hinder Syria’s recovery, the importance of combating terrorism in all its forms, the return of displaced Syrians and refugees, and the advancement of a genuinely inclusive political process rooted in the will of the Syrian people,” the Syrian official said.
Al-Sharaa, who led the Islamist rebel group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) to victory over Assad, ditched his military fatigues for a Western-style suit and has been on a charm offensive, hosting European and Western diplomats and politicians in hopes of bringing Syria out from its international pariah status.
The new Syrian leader received an unprecedented endorsement from President Donald Trump when the two met in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in May.
Trump called al-Sharaa a “young, attractive, tough guy,” announcing that the U.S. would lift sanctions in place since the Assad era and even discussed normalizing relations.

People welcome the leader of Syria’s Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group that headed a lightning rebel offensive snatching Damascus from government control, Ahmed al-Sharaa (C), before his address at the capital’s landmark Umayyad Mosque on December 8, 2024. Al-Sharaa gave a speech as the crowd chanted “Allahu akbar (God is greatest),” in a video shared by the rebels on their Telegram channel showed. (Aref Tammawi/AFP via Getty Images)
Hall noted that al-Sharaa might be looking to secure a security pact between Israel and Syria along the UNGA sidelines, emphasizing that he seeks a Syria that is at peace with its neighbors and doesn’t want to position Syria to be a threat to any outside forces, particularly Israel.
He will also be looking to secure much-needed reconstruction aid to rebuild a country ravaged by 13 years of civil war. The cost for reconstruction is estimated to be between $250 and $400 billion, and 16.7 million people, or 75% of the population, are in dire need of humanitarian assistance, according to the U.N.
Since seizing Damascus, he has publicly said all the right things. He promised an inclusive government that would represent all religious and ethnic factions in Syria, uphold women’s rights and protect minority rights.
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Al-Sharaa also fulfilled promises to target ISIS and other terrorist groups operating in Syria. One month after taking power, Syrian security forces seized a shipment of heavy ammunition destined for Hezbollah in Lebanon, once a key ally of the Assad regime and Iran’s Axis of Resistance.
While optimism for a new Syria remains high, some caution it’s still too soon to judge al-Sharaa as a Western ally given his terrorist past.
“Al-Sharaa is not a democrat. He ruled Idlib without power-sharing. So far, in terms of control of vital government functions like security, foreign affairs, intelligence and justice, he has put loyalists in place,” former U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford told Fox News Digital.
Ford, who was the last U.S. ambassador in Damascus in 2011, said the crucial question is whether, over time, individual political and civil liberties will be respected and that people maintain, as they have now, the freedom to organize and protest.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio shakes hands with Syrian interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa at the Lotte New York Palace Hotel, on the sidelines of the 80th United Nations General Assembly at the United Nations headquarters, Monday, Sept. 22, 2025. (Bing Guan/Pool Photo via AP)
“Al-Sharaa’s heavy hand ruling Idlib prior to Assad’s fall has been lighter in Damascus, Aleppo and elsewhere. But so far, there is more political freedom to speak and protest in Syria than in many other countries in the region, such as Egypt, Algeria and some Gulf states,” Ford added.
Ambassador Barbara Leaf, who served as assistant secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, visited Damascus and met with Shara in December, becoming the highest-ranking official to meet with Syrian leadership since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011.
Leaf, a distinguished diplomatic fellow with the Middle East Institute, told Fox News Digital about her initial contact with Shara right after HTS overthrew Assad. Her mission was to get eyes on him, to assess him and to send a clear signal on U.S. expectations if he was going to lead a new Syria.
“My takeaway from the meeting was that he came across as somebody who was very well-prepared for the discussion. He had clearly anticipated all of the topics that I raised and he had pretty thoughtful responses with a readiness to engage,” she said.

Syrian security forces walk together along a street, after clashes between Syrian government troops and local Druze fighters resumed in the southern Druze city of Sweida early on Wednesday, collapsing a ceasefire announced just hours earlier that aimed to put an end to days of deadly sectarian bloodshed, in Sweida, Syria, July 16, 2025. (Karam al-Masri/Reuters)
Al-Sharaa made a point several times to say that Syria would no longer be a threat or a staging point for threats against its neighbors, including Israel, and that he would not allow the Iranians, Hezbollah or Palestinian groups, to use Syrian territory to conduct terrorist activities, the ambassador said.
“I came to the sense that he was already making a shift from being a military commander to being a politician, to being a political leader,” Ambassador Leaf noted.
While Ambassador Leaf highlighted his pragmatism, his true intentions as the new leader of Syria remain murky.
The ambassador said that it appears al-Sharaa has traveled a trajectory away from his jihadist terrorist past, but it remains a question how far he is willing to go to effectuate what she believes is an intention to form an Islamist style of governance.
CHRISTIAN WATCH GROUP RISES UP TO PROTECT COMMUNITY AMID GROWING VIOLENCE IN SYRIA
“Does he want to formulate a kind of Islamist governance, conservative governance and social order that, frankly, Syria has not seen? And would he be willing to use force to get there? That’s an unknown,” the ambassador cautioned.
What’s concerning for Ambassador Leaf and others is that many of the people serving in key roles in the transitional government are close associates of al-Sharaa and others affiliated with HTS and other allied armed rebel groups.
“Al-Sharaa is still engaged in a careful balancing act within his own government between liberal opposition voices, former regime bureaucrats and more Islamist proponents aligned still with HTS’ mission and principles,” Caroline Rose, director of The New Lines Institute, told Fox News Digital.

Ahmed al-Sharaa, once known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, is seen in Syria Feb. 7, 2023. Since becoming the country’s president, he has gone back to his given name. (Omar Haj Kadour/AFP via Getty Images)
EVANGELICAL LEADER SAYS US MUST PROTECT SYRIAN CHRISTIANS FROM ATTACKS BY JIHADI TERRORISTS
Rose, who traveled to Syria earlier this year, said that Syria’s complex political dynamics have led not only to gridlock, but even incapacity in times of crisis, “such as failure to rein in radical Sunni fighters during violent outbreaks in Latakia and Suwayda, but also policies appeasing more conservative elements of al-Sharaa’s support network, such as the ruling requiring full-body swimwear at Syrian pools and beaches.”
While Syria’s new government has looked to consolidate control over a restive society, Shara’s forces had to manage a fragile society divided along ethnic and religious lines.
Syria has experienced a wave of sectarian violence since the revolution to overthrow Assad. Government security forces retaliated after forces loyal to the Assad regime launched an attack in the coastal city of Latakia, Assad’s hometown. In total, around 1,400 people, mostly civilians, were massacred, according to the U.N. Most of the victims from the Alawites, a minority group in Syria, which the Assad family belonged to, as well as from the Druze community.
It was the worst episode of violence since the overthrow of Assad in December 2024.

In this photo released by the Syrian official news agency SANA, a Civil Defense worker inspects the damage inside Mar Elias church where a suicide bomber detonated himself in Dweil’a on the outskirts of Damascus, Syria, Sunday, June 22, 2025. (SANA via AP)
Clashes between Bedouin tribes, Druze militias and government forces in Suweida led to hundreds of deaths and drew in Israeli military intervention — to protect Syria’s Druze minority. A ceasefire was eventually agreed to but the spiraling ethnic violence highlights Syria’s rocky transition.
The country’s dwindling Christian community has also felt the brunt of extremist violence. In June, the Islamic State was suspected of carrying out a deadly suicide bombing at a Greek Orthodox church in Syria, which killed 22 worshipers and injured 63 others. Christians have also been attacked and, in some cases, killed, allegedly by forces tied to the al-Sharaa government.
The new authorities will also have to incorporate Kurdish forces operating in Northeast Syria, where the Syrian Democratic Forces have been crucial to the U.S.-led counter-ISIS campaign. Any disruptions in the merging of the SDF into the Syrian state raises the risk of an ISIS resurgence.
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