iranwire – Rahil cradles her six-month-old baby in one arm while checking her phone with the other, waiting for a text from a friend.
Not about politics or family gossip, but about something more urgent: whether their household water tank still has enough to wash a load of infant clothes.
“God knows, some days for six hours, sometimes up to 12 hours, the piped water is cut off,” the young mother says, describing a routine that has become numbingly familiar across Iran.
“Forget about showering – with this situation, how are we supposed to have clean clothes for the baby?”
When the water stops flowing in her apartment near the Falahiyeh canal in oil-rich Khuzestan province, Rahil joins a growing number of Iranians forced to seek necessities from neighbors and relatives.
She walks to friends’ homes, hoping to find a full storage tank or an active connection, scrambling to prepare her baby’s supplies before the next outage.
This is daily life in Iran, where severe water rationing has transformed existence for millions of citizens.
From the villages of Khuzestan to the capital Tehran, Iranians are confronting what psychiatrists now call “climate anxiety” – a collective dread born from watching their most basic resource disappear.
Autumn 2025 marked the driest season in 58 years, with precipitation falling 81 per cent below the long-term average, according to official sources.
Dam reserves supplying major cities have dropped to alarming levels.
Government officials have confirmed that water rationing is in effect across multiple regions, though residents say the cuts do not follow a predictable pattern.
“Around midnight until near morning, when people are resting and asleep, we reduce water pressure to decrease urban leakage and create an opportunity to fill urban reservoirs,” Issa Bozorgzadeh, spokesperson for the water industry, said in November, confirming the nighttime restrictions.
But citizens dispute the claim that cuts are timed to minimize disruption.
“Two or three hours after we return home, it’s cut off – as if they deliberately set the cut time for when people are in their homes,” says a Karaj resident who works until 5 p.m.
He describes rushing to shower after work, only to have the water stop mid-stream, leaving him covered in soap.
“I don’t know whom to complain to. Only stress, anger, fury, and cursing have been our lot in this life.”
The crisis reveals a bitter irony, most visible in Abu Kabiriyeh, a village of 80 households located 45 kilometers from Khuzestan’s provincial capital, in the heart of one of Iran’s richest oil-producing regions.
The Karun and Marun companies extract nearly two million barrels of oil daily from 750 active wells surrounding the community.
Ten drilling rigs operate around the clock. Smoke from the Marun Petrochemical Complex is visible from the village center.
Yet residents live without reliable access to clean water or electricity.
“When you walk through the alleys of Gheyzaniyeh and Abu Kabiriyeh, crude oil flows on the ground like a stream,” says a civil activist from Ahvaz who grew up in the area.
“Oil is wealth for everyone else but a curse for the locals because it seeps into agricultural lands and pastures. Meanwhile, people are desperate for water they can drink.”
The activist recalls when villagers’ biggest worry was affording their water bills.
“There was water, even though it seemed mixed with mud, tasting of oil and sludge, as if it came through rusty, dirty pipes – but it existed. Now the water is cut off for days and hours. Not just water, electricity cuts continue too.”
Abu Kabiriyeh has no paved roads.
When rain falls, an increasingly rare event, the paths flood, forcing children to reach school by tractor.
Crude oil contamination has sickened crops and livestock. At least 280 young people with bachelor’s degrees or higher live in this village and surrounding communities, unemployed and excluded from jobs at the petrochemical facilities extracting wealth from beneath their feet.
In Shadegan, where Rahil lives with her farmer father, the ecological collapse is equally stark.
The Falahiyeh canal, which once symbolized life and prosperity in her childhood, is now dry, its bed littered with waste.
“If you’re from Khuzestan, water cuts aren’t new. We’ve been familiar with water shortages and cuts since childhood,” Rahil says. “But before, the canal had water. Houses had tanks, and rain would fall. Now the canal is dry.”
The agricultural impact is severe. Jamshid Eslamian, director of agriculture in Shadegan, has predicted the city’s date harvest – the backbone of the local economy for generations – could drop by 15 per cent if drought and low rainfall continue.
In a region where economic, social, and cultural life depends on water, the implications extend far beyond disrupted showers and unwashed laundry.
“The anticipation we have for rain is indescribable,” says a Kianshahr resident in Ahvaz. “Autumn and winter rains are both a blessing and a curse for people in the south.
“A blessing because at least the dams fill and the cuts decrease. A curse because we mourn the sewage rises and contamination of piped water.”
In Kianshahr, water typically cuts off at 11 p.m. and returns at 6 a.m., though apartment dwellers on upper floors often wait until 8 a.m. for supply to resume.
In Karaj, near Tehran, Reza reports similar overnight cuts from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., but his mother, living just blocks away, faces even longer outages.
“She often calls, and I take buckets of water to them,” he says.
Another Karaj resident describes escalating restrictions. Summer brought three-hour daily cuts. By fall, that increased to four, then eight.
“During the day we have water, when we’re not home,” the civil servant says.
Compounding environmental crises have intensified public distress.
Tehran has endured more than 10 days of unprecedented air pollution, trapping residents between toxic outdoor air and inadequate indoor conditions.
With dam reserves dwindling and water rationed, many feel caught in an impossible situation.
Ziba, who lives in Phase 10 of Pardis near Tehran, sometimes goes more than 15 hours without water.
“It’s even happened that it’s cut for a full day, but usually it’s completely gone for 10 to 12 hours. For two or three hours, it returns with very low pressure. How much should we store to get through the day?”
“Hell was described to us in school as a place we would wait before going to purgatory. We’re living in hell and purgatory right now. Our tables are smaller than ever. And now there’s no air and no water. The first three essentials for survival and staying alive have been taken from us.”
The crisis has reached Kurdistan as well. In Baneh, water rationing that began as six-hour daily cuts approximately six months ago has deteriorated into a more difficult situation.
Officials have warned of complete shut-offs and suggested mobile water tankers as a solution.
“Sometimes we have water for only two hours, and because demand is so high, tanks don’t fill completely,” a Baneh resident says. “This becomes extremely problematic, especially in higher areas where water pressure is low. In these conditions, priority goes to drinking water and basic sanitation.
Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, has urged citizens to reduce consumption of “water and bread.”
But many say such appeals are meaningless when taps run dry for hours at a time.
Mental health experts have identified what they call “climate anxiety” emerging across Iranian society – a persistent dread triggered not only by personal deprivation but by awareness of the crisis’s scale.
According to specialists, even citizens not yet facing shortages report fear, worry, anger, guilt, and helplessness after following news of the water crisis.