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The threat from the jihadists is so critical that U.S. forces are bombing the militants close to both the Mosul and Haditha dams - Iraq's largest - on a near-daily basis. But the radical Islamists continue to menace both facilities.

The Sunni militants want to seize the dams to bolster their claim that they are building an actual state; the dams are key to irrigating the country's vast wheat fields and providing Iraqis with electricity. More ominously, the Islamic State has used its control over water facilities - including as many as four dams along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers - to displace communities or deprive them of crucial water supplies.

The Islamic State "understands how powerful water is as a tool, and they are not afraid to use it," said Michael Stephens, a Middle East expert and deputy director of the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based security studies think tank.

Water has long played a role in armed struggle, from the Allied bombing of German dams during World War II to Saddam Hussein's draining of Iraq's southern marshes in the 1990s to punish residents for a rebellion.

But the idea of a radical nonstate group gaining authority over critical water infrastructure has raised particular worry. The White House was so alarmed in August when Islamic State fighters briefly seized the Mosul Dam - located on the Tigris River that runs through Baghdad - that it backed a major operation by Iraqi and Kurdish forces to wrest it back.

"If that dam was breached, it could have proven catastrophic, with floods that would have threatened the lives of thousands of civilians and endangered our embassy compound in Baghdad," President Obama said on Aug. 18, the day Iraqi forces retook the structure.

Having nurtured the world's first civilizations along the Fertile Crescent - the ancient strip of food-bearing land that arced across the Middle East - Iraq's Tigris and Euphrates Rivers remain the lifeblood of Iraq's agricultural life. They also generate its electricity and provide water to households.

But water levels in Iraq have fallen in recent years, due to decreased rainfall, heavy water use and other factors, the United Nations says. According to the world body, the flow of the Euphrates is expected to decline by more than 50 percent by 2025. By then, Iraq could already be suffering from a shortage of 33 billion cubic meters of water per year, U.N. officials say.

"The country does not have enough [water], and shortages have been huge economic - and thus political - problems for several years now," said Kenneth Pollack, an expert on Middle Eastern military affairs at the Brookings Institution. Any attempts by the Islamic State to cut flows "would be enormously damaging," he said.

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Islamic State jihadists are using water as a weapon in Iraq