How to tackle Basra’s water problems

Iraqi governments have failed to provide safe, drinkable water to much of the population. (AFP)
Updated 15 August 2019
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How to tackle Basra’s water problems

  • Iraqi city’s unsafe water causes water-borne disease outbreaks and economic hardship
  • A HRW study says pollution, mismanagement and corruption lie at the root of the water problems

DUBAI: It was dubbed the “Venice of the Middle East” for its network of waterways that invited comparisons to the Italian city. But Basra is today emblematic of almost everything that is wrong with Iraq. Few maladies, though, reflect the depth of the rot in the country’s system like the port city’s acute water crisis.

Situated where the Euphrates and Tigris rivers merge near the Gulf at Iraq’s southern tip, Basra is home to 2.5 million people but lacks an effective water treatment system. Be it the Shatt Al-Arab River or the canals, Basra’s water resources have fallen victim to “decades of pollution, mismanagement and corruption,” according to a recent report by the Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The study was prompted by a creeping sense over the past two decades that the concept of human rights is not relevant to the average citizen of fragile states such as Iraq. Belkis Wille, a senior Iraq researcher in the HRW’s Middle East and North Africa division, said a desire to counter that impression inspired her to conduct the investigation.

“I wanted to emphasize to Iraqis that the issues they care about on a daily basis are human rights issues, so I was waiting to come across the right opportunity to drive home that point,” Wille said.

In Basra’s water crisis, which has blighted large expanses of southern Iraq, she found a direct connection between human rights violations and corruption. “In Iraq, no matter what their religion or ethnic identity, everyone agrees that corruption is one of the biggest problems facing the country, with deeply damaging consequences,” she said. “So I wanted to look at it from a rights perspective.”

In the 1960s, Basra had an advanced sanitary infrastructure, but for almost 30 years, governments have failed to provide safe, drinkable water to much of the population. Tempers flared in the summer of last year when water-borne disease outbreaks led to the hospitalization of tens of thousands of residents. Protests erupted in the city once against this summer as anger over deteriorating services and economic hardship boiled over.




A decrease in the amount of water flowing to the Shatt Al-Arab and its canals resulted in higher levels of sewage, industrial pollution and water salinity. (AFP)

Wille says what lies at the root of Basra’s chronic water crisis is not one but a number of different factors: Reduced water flow, seawater intrusion, pollution and mismanagement of waterways.

“It rained and snowed a lot over Christmas and early this January, so that means the water situation across Iraq this year is theoretically better, with more water flowing through the waterways.

“This means Iraq should not have as much seawater intrusion as before, so water pollution should therefore also be reduced,” she said.

The reality of the situation is another matter.

“We know in terms of global trends of low rainfall and increasing temperatures, this means that when there is another year of low rainfall, then the crisis will be worse,” Wille said.

Until the early 1980s, Basra was a magnet for Middle Eastern tourists, but these days an estimated 338,400 residents of the city live in informal housing spread throughout the oil-rich governorate. These homes are excluded from the formal water and sanitation networks, making them water-insecure.

According to the UN, almost 4,000 individuals in the Basra governorate had to leave their homes in August 2018. This was most likely due to poor access to adequate supplies of potable water, although a causal link between the two has not been proven.

What is known is that last year, there was a decrease in the amount of water flowing to the Shatt Al-Arab and its canals from rivers upstream, which resulted in higher levels of sewage, agricultural, industrial pollution and salinity in the water.

Prior to 2018, Basra had experienced water-related health emergencies in 2009 and 2015, but, according to the HRW report, local and federal authorities failed to properly address the underlying causes or establish procedures to protect residents before a new crisis arose. For example, during the 2018 crisis, authorities did not adequately alert residents to the dangers posed by poor water quality.

Iraqi ministries did cooperate with Wille’s investigation, but the report also said that the results of tests of water samples from the Shatt Al-Arab and treatment plants after the protests of 2018 summer were not made public. HRW was told by all federal and local authorities that the results and reports were confidential.

With the help of satellite imagery, Wille’s research found that two major spills had occurred in 2018 that leaked oil into the Shatt Al-Arab in central Basra. 

Again, the government did not apprise the public of the oil spills, even though many residents had complained about a gasoline smell in their tap water and some were even able to set the water aflame.

In the process, the HRW report was able to identify a glaring drawback of Iraq’s regulatory regime: The absence of a public health advisory to inform residents when drinking water is contaminated, how to reduce harm and protocols for government officials to respond to advisories and lift them.

“Basra residents now apparently risk illness from just using the water to wash their food or themselves, and the authorities have not enforced standards even for water for these purposes,” Wille said.

“The lack of sufficient freshwater has also cost Basra its title as the country’s biggest producer of dates. Farmers have been irrigating their farmland with the saline water from the Shatt Al-Arab for many years now, killing off most of their crops and livestock as a result.”

Her next step will be to meet officials in Baghdad in September and push for the adoption of the three pages of recommendations from the HRW report. Later in the month, she intends to hold meetings with officials of European countries that may want to contribute to the amelioration of Iraq’s water situation.

“Our primary recommendation is for the establishment of an inter-ministerial body that includes local authorities,” Wille said, adding that the current arrangement “allows the federal government (in Baghdad) to blame the authorities in Basra for everything.” Although she is not sure about the political will to implement the primary recommendation, Wille is not giving up hope. “The creation of such a body would be the first step towards implementing the report’s recommendations,” she said. “At the moment, even if the government adopts them, it does not have the buy-in to implement them.”

After years of occupation, sectarian strife, misrule and underinvestment, few expect Basra to regain its fabled beauty any time soon. But some tentative steps towards a resolution of the ongoing water crisis do not seem like an unreasonable demand.

 


Peshmerga fighter dies in Turkish strike in north Iraq

Updated 8 sec ago
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Peshmerga fighter dies in Turkish strike in north Iraq

JEDDAH: A member of the Kurdish Peshmerga security forces was killed on Friday in a Turkish drone strike in the autonomous Kurdistan region of northern Iraq.

Ankara regularly carries out ground and air operations in the region against positions of the outlawed PKK, the Kurdish separatist group that has waged a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state.
The victim of Friday’s attack died in a drone strike on his vehicle, said Ihsan Chalabi, mayor of the mountainous Sidakan district near Iraq’s borders with Turkiye and Iran.
For decades, Turkiye has operated several dozen military bases in northern Iraq in its war against the PKK, which Ankara and its Western allies consider a terrorist group.
Both Baghdad and the Kurdish regional government have been accused of tolerating Turkiye’s military activities to preserve their close economic ties.
At the beginning of April, a man described as “high-ranking military official” from the PKK was killed in a Turkish drone strike on a car in the mountainous Sinjar region, according to the Kurdistan counterterrorism services.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is expected to visit Baghdad on Monday on his first official visit to Iraq since 2011.
Iraq’s Defense Minister Thabet Al-Abassi in March ruled out joint military operations against the PKK, but said that Turkiye and Iraq would “work to set up a joint intelligence coordination center.”


Middle East in ‘shadow of uncertainty due to regional conflicts’

Updated 7 min 10 sec ago
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Middle East in ‘shadow of uncertainty due to regional conflicts’

WASHINGTON: Economies in the Middle East and North Africa face a “shadow of uncertainty” from ongoing tensions in the region, a senior IMF official said.
“We are in a context where the overall outlook is cast into shadows,” Jihad Azour, the International Monetary Fund’s director for the Middle East and Central Asia department, said in an interview in Washington.
“The shadow of uncertainty on the geopolitical side is an important one,” added Azour, a recent candidate for the next Lebanese president.
In the face of the ongoing conflicts in Gaza and Sudan and a recent cut to oil supplies by Gulf countries, the IMF has pared back its growth outlook for the Middle East and North Africa region once again.

FASTFACT

Economic activity in Gaza has ‘come to a standstill’ and the IMF estimates that economic output in the West Bank and Gaza contracted by six percent last year.

The IMF expects growth in MENA of 2.7 percent this year — 0.2 percentage points below its January forecast — before picking up again next year, the IMF said in its regional economic outlook report.
The risks to growth in the MENA region remain heightened, the IMF said, pointing to the danger of greater regional spillovers from the ongoing Israel-Gaza war.
“We have concerns about the immediate and lasting impact of conflict,” Azour said.
The IMF report said that economic activity in Gaza has “come to a standstill” and estimates that economic output in the West Bank and Gaza contracted by 6 percent last year.
The IMF said the report excludes economic projections for the West Bank and Gaza for the next five years “on account of the unusually high degree of uncertainty.”
The IMF cannot lend to the West Bank and Gaza because they are not IMF member countries.
However, Azour said it has provided the Palestinian Authority and the central bank with technical assistance during the current conflict.
“When we move into the reconstruction phase, we will be part of the international community support to the region,” he added.
Azour also discussed the situation in Sudan, where thousands have been killed in a civil war that has also devastated the economy, causing it to contract by almost 20 percent last year, according to the IMF.
“The country is barely functioning, institutions have been dismantled,” he said.
“And for an economy, for a country like Sudan, with all this potential, it’s important to stop the bleeding very quickly and move to a phase of reconstruction,” he added.
The recent Houthi attacks have particularly badly hit the Egyptian economy on Red Sea shipping, which caused trade through the Egypt-run Suez Canal to more than halve — depriving the country of a key source of foreign exchange.
Egypt reached an agreement last month to increase an existing IMF loan package from $3 billion to $8 billion after its central bank hiked interest rates and allowed the pound to plunge by nearly 40 percent.
A key pillar of the current IMF program is the privatization of Egypt’s state-owned enterprises, many of which are owned by or linked to the military.
“This is a priority for Egypt,” Azour said. Egypt needs to have a growing private sector and give space for the private sector to create more jobs.”
“We have an opportunity to re-engineer the state’s role, to give the state more responsibility as an enabler and less as a competitor,” he said.

 


Oxfam director urges global support for refugees in Jordan

Updated 10 min 14 sec ago
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Oxfam director urges global support for refugees in Jordan

  • Dmitry Medlev speaks of impact of over 3m people from neighboring areas

LONDON: Oxfam’s country director in Jordan said on Friday the global community had a responsibility to support refugees, especially in light of unrest in the Middle East.

In an interview with the Jordan News Agency, Dmitry Medlev described how an influx of over 3 million refugees from neighboring areas had stretched Jordan’s economic resources, disrupted local communities, and burdened public services.

He described the refugee’s experience as harrowing, often involving the painful process of abandoning the individual’s homeland and everything they held dear.

He said: “We are sending a message to the world not to overlook the refugee problem and to keep its focus on the new global disasters created by humans or caused by natural disasters, and the conflicts that have emerged in several countries recently, because the refugee problem is draining host countries and imposing additional burdens on them that they may not be able to bear in the future.”

Medlev called for enhanced international cooperation and adherence to international humanitarian law in supporting refugees, underscoring the need for long-term solutions to the ongoing crisis.

He also spoke of Oxfam’s initiatives in Jordan, such as the Waste to Positive Energy project in partnership with the Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development, and the EU, and executed with the German Corporation for International Cooperation. The project focuses on waste management and recycling in Zaatari Camp and Mafraq Governorate, processing about 30 tonnes of waste per day.

Medlev also pointed out Oxfam’s efforts in promoting economic and climate justice through grants aimed at empowering local projects led by women and youngsters. These grants help enhance project efficiency, ensure sustainability, and connect beneficiaries with supportive institutions.

He outlined Oxfam’s five-year strategy in Jordan, which focuses on gender justice, climate justice, and economic justice, and aims to bolster the country’s preparedness for disasters, enhance employment opportunities, and provide humanitarian support for refugees.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II told the UN General Assembly in September that the world must not abandon Palestinian refugees to the forces of despair.
 


Sudanese rue shattered dreams as war enters second year

Updated 13 min 5 sec ago
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Sudanese rue shattered dreams as war enters second year

  • Bashir’s ouster in April 2019 ushered in a civilian-led transition that saw an outpouring of “hope, inspiration and vibrancy” among young Sudanese, said Samah Salman, who worked in corporate venture capital then

DUBAI: Lawyer Omar Ushari still remembers the hope that gripped Khartoum after the uprising that overthrew President Omar Bashir in 2019. Now, after a year of war between rival generals, much of the Sudanese capital lies in ruins.
The 46-year-old, then detained for his activism, celebrated behind bars when Bashir was toppled in a palace coup.
In the heady days that followed, as the army promised a transition to elective civilian rule, Ushari was released and set to work on his dream project: a literary cafe near the banks of the Nile.
Named Rateena, his cafe swiftly became known as a safe haven for young activists eager to contribute to building a “better Sudan.”
But on April 15 last year, the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces went to war, and Ushari watched both his project and his dreams for the country “fade, bit by bit.”

BACKGROUND

Omar Bashir’s ouster in April 2019 ushered in a civilian-led transition that saw an outpouring of ‘hope, inspiration and vibrancy’ among young Sudanese, says Samah Salman, who worked in corporate venture capital then.

For months, he braved raging street battles to visit Rateena, “sit in the dark, take stock of what had been looted since my last visit, and reminisce.”
He did not understand how “the music that filled the space, the lectures and debates people shared, had been replaced with stray bullets strewn around me and the sound of tank fire outside.”
Now, as the war has entered its second year, with thousands dead and millions more driven from their homes, Ushari says he is “only one of the thousands of dreams shattered” — a microcosm of “a stolen revolution.”
Bashir’s ouster in April 2019 ushered in a civilian-led transition that saw an outpouring of “hope, inspiration and vibrancy” among young Sudanese, said Samah Salman, who worked in corporate venture capital then.
Startups were “springing up all across Sudan,” she said from the US, “all building extraordinary solutions to real needs ordinary Sudanese people were facing.”
Salman reviewed over 50 startups in telehealth, agritech, renewable energy, logistics, and fintech solutions, crediting the boom to “the energy of the revolution.”
According to Ushari, “hopes were high that Sudan was finally on the right path, out of the shadows and heading toward democracy, toward freedom.”
Like countless others, communications expert Raghdan Orsud, 36, wanted to play her part.
She co-founded Beam Reports to investigate disinformation in Sudan — “out of the belief in the role media can play in democratic transition,” she said from London.
But that transition ended in October 2021, two months after Beam Reports launched.
The same generals who would later go to war — army chief Gen. Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan and his then-deputy RSF commander Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo — ousted civilians from the transitional administration.
“Nothing was the same after the coup,” Ushari said.
“It was a painful time. They were killing protesters every week, but still, we had hope.”
Then, one fateful Saturday at the end of Ramadan, the people of Khartoum awoke to the sounds of air strikes and shelling as their worst fears came true: the erstwhile allies had turned their guns on each other.
Bodies began piling up on the streets as vicious urban warfare drove millions to flee.
Orsud had just bought studio-grade recording equipment, “still in their boxes,” when RSF paramilitaries seized and looted her offices.
Ushari was piecing together a life in Cairo when he received a video message showing a massive fire.
“That’s how I found out Rateena had burned down,” he said.
Countless Sudanese in the diaspora — who had spent decades saving up to build their Khartoum homes — have been forced to watch from afar as the RSF looted them.
“At some point, he was praying for an airstrike to hit the house,” pastry chef Shaimaa Adlan, 29, said in Cairo, referring to her father in Saudi Arabia.
“He would have rather seen it destroyed than know his life’s work was being used as a paramilitary base.”
Adlan had started a catering business in Khartoum before finding herself in Egypt — uprooted and jobless.
But barely a year later, she sprints through a bustling kitchen in Cairo, shouting orders to her staff and fussing over dishes.
Back home, Salman says the war has not crushed Sudanese entrepreneurialism, just redirected it.
She said tech entrepreneurs now crowdsource real-time safety updates instead of protest plans and optimize evacuation paths instead of delivery routes.
The same young people organizing demonstrations now coordinate aid, becoming what the UN calls “the front line” of humanitarian response.
And in displacement centers and the diaspora, the dream of a new Sudan has not been forgotten.
“No matter where we’ve been exiled or what remote Sudanese state we’ve ended up in, there’s still a spark of the revolution left in every heart,” Ushari said.
“Sudan is ours, it’s all of ours,” said Orsud, whose fact-checking team has resumed operations from Nairobi.
“What else would we do besides rebuild it, over and over?“

 


Deaths from heavy rains in UAE rise to four

People stand next to water pumping trucks a flooded street in Dubai following heavy rains on April 19, 2024. (AFP)
Updated 26 min 46 sec ago
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Deaths from heavy rains in UAE rise to four

  • Scientists blame human-led global warming for increasingly common extreme weather events, such as the rains in UAE and Oman

DUBAI: Deaths from heavy rains earlier this week in the UAE rose to four, authorities said on Friday, as well as flooding roads and jamming Dubai’s international airport.
The storm first hit Oman at the weekend, killing at least 20 people, before pounding the UAE on Tuesday with its heaviest rains in 75 years of records.
Two Philippine women and one man died in their vehicles during flooding, the government in Manila said. An Emirati man in his 70s had also died when his vehicle was swept away by floods in the northern Ras Al-Khaimah emirate.

BACKGROUND

Dubai International Airport was still struggling on Friday to clear a backlog of flights three days after the storm.

Scientists blame human-led global warming for increasingly common extreme weather events, such as the rains in UAE and Oman.
Dubai International Airport, one of the world’s busiest and a hub for travel around the Middle East, was still struggling to clear a backlog of flights three days after the storm.
It was limiting arrivals for two days until Sunday.
Flagship carrier Emirates, one of the world’s biggest international airlines, said check-in was suspended for people planning to transit via Dubai though those with the city as a final destination could travel as usual.
According to aircraft flight tracking website FlightRadar24, as of Friday morning, 1,478 flights to and from Dubai had been canceled since Tuesday, approximately 30 percent of all flights.
In Abu Dhabi, state carrier Etihad said flight operations were normal.
The main road connecting Dubai, the most populous emirate, with Abu Dhabi remained partially closed on Friday, while an alternative route saw vehicles driving through low water on the hard shoulder past abandoned cars and buses.
In the UAE’s north, including in the emirate of Sharjah, local media reported people were reportedly still trapped in homes. Residents said there was extensive damage to businesses.
The UAE’s National Center of Meteorology said rain may return by late on Monday, though predicted it would be light with a chance of heavy rain again on Tuesday in some areas.