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Four of the commission’s five members set the Syr Darya’s winter regime at Avaza

The Interstate Coordination Water Commission’s 95th session agreed water-withdrawal volumes and reservoir regimes for the 2026 to 2027 non-growing season on Wednesday, after Shardara received 3.69 billion cubic metres in the growing season, 840 million above forecast, by Kazakhstan’s water ministry as Kazinform carried it. The Turkmen chair’s readout and the Kazakh one name four delegations, and neither names Kyrgyzstan.

By CAW Staff8 October 2026
A concrete dam spilling water through three gates at dusk with a single amber lamp on the parapet.

Durdy Gendzhiev, chairman of Turkmenistan’s State Committee for Water Management, chaired, with Kazakhstan’s water minister Nurzhan Nurzhigitov, Uzbekistan’s Shavkat Khamraev and Tajikistan’s Daler Abdukhalok, head of the main department of water and energy policy at the energy ministry, and with the commission’s secretariat, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya basin organisations, its research centre and the executive committee of the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea, by the Turkmen foreign ministry’s post and the Kazakh ministry’s account. The growing season on the Syr Darya passed in a stable regime, the Kazakh readout says, and the inflow to Shardara in the non-growing season is expected at about 10 billion cubic metres. Shardara got 840 million cubic metres more than forecast, and the commission’s two lists carry four names where its membership has five.

The sitting reviewed the use of water-intake limits and the reservoirs’ regimes in the 2026 growing season on both basins, agreed the distribution and the forecast regimes of the reservoir cascades for the non-growing season, and discussed the fourth Aral Sea basin programme, water-saving and digital technologies and climate adaptation before adopting a protocol, by the Turkmen post. The parties agreed to convene a working group on a plan for an automated water-accounting system in the Syr Darya basin, by Kazinform.

Shardara got 840 million cubic metres more than forecast, and the commission’s two lists carry four names where its membership has five.

A high-level meeting of the Central Asian states on the Amu Darya and Syr Darya sat the same day under the same Turkmen committee, with ministers and heads of agencies presenting national reports and working out, in the foreign ministry’s words, a common vision of further steps, with no document named. Kazinform places the commission in Turkmenbashi and the Turkmen post at Avaza, the resort beside it, and the next reading of the Syr Darya’s winter is the Toktogul release schedule, which belongs to the member absent from both lists.

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