Throughout the Middle East, water shortages, asymmetries in political-military power and water control, consumption and demand interplay form a complex hydro political web. The current allocation arrangements of the region’s three major river basins – the Nile, the Euphrates–Tigris and the Jordan – are nascent sources of tension, and potential sources of conflict and violence. Turkish relations with both Iraq and Syria are strained over Turkey’s South East Anatolia Project. Egypt is concerned about the water development activities of the upstream users of the Nile. Of all the Middle East’s river basins, however, it is the Jordan River that hosts the most violent fraught and inflammable dispute.