Today is the third day that students from the Yazidi village of Tlik, in Armenia’s Aragatzotn region, are on strike to protest the decades-old lack of daily drinking water.

"23 out of the 26 schoolchildren are on strike over water," said Alik Mstoyan, a resident of Tlik, who teaches the Yezidi language at the village school.

Mstoyan told Hetq that only the mayor’s three children aren’t participating in the strike.

Mstoyan says the village has been unable to draw water from the Akhuryan River for two months. This water is used for daily chores and for livestock.

Tlik is located on the Armenian-Turkish border on the bank of the Akhuryan River.

The village has lacked drinking water since 1993.

Residents buy their drinking water from a truck that comes from Talin every seven or ten days.  Water for washing and animals is pumped from the Akhuryan and is collected in a large tank in the village. Residents pay for this water as well.

Mstoyan says a delay in getting a newly installed pump to work has forced village residents to buy household/irrigation and potable water for the past two months.

Tlik Mayor Slavik Saloyan says his office has completed and filed all the necessary paperwork to get the wat flowing.

“They won’t turn it on until the permits are issued. We can’t do anything,” says Saloyan.

The mayor says the village has gone without irrigation water for one, not two months.

As for drinking water, which the village has been deprived of for years, Saloyan says the issue is still in progress being worked on.

In July of last year, the mayor said he hoped that Tlik would have drinking water by the end of 2019.

He noted that the site of the deep well to be dug had already been examined and that it was now in the hands of the drilling company.

2019 has come and gone and Tlik still has no drinking water.

Saloyan, Tlik’s mayor since 2015, was re-elected in January of this year.