HILLA: Hundreds of Iraqis protested Friday against severe water shortages exacerbated by the summer’s sweltering heat in the central province of Babylon, an AFP correspondent said.
Iraq, and its 46 million inhabitants, have been intensely impacted by the effects of climate change, experiencing rising temperatures, year-on-year droughts and reduced river flows.
Authorities also blame upstream dams built in neighboring Iran and Turkiye for dramatically lowering the flow of the once-mighty Tigris and Euphrates, which have irrigated Iraq for millennia.
In the village of Al-Majriyeh near the city of Hilla, more than 300 angry protesters urged the government to take action and solve the long-standing water issue, a day after the police dispersed a similar protest.
“We have been without water for 35 days and it has already been scarce for years,” protester Saadoun Al-Shammari, 66, said.
Another protester Kahtan Hussein, 35, said “it is our basic right, we don’t want anything more.”
“We don’t have any water and the pipes have gone dry.”
Iraq’s water resources ministry has said that “this year is one of the driest since 1933.”
It added that Iraq currently retains only eight percent of its water reserves capacity.
The ministry warned that the decline in water and the “lack of cooperation from upstream countries will worsen the crisis and threaten the country’s water security.”
In May, the ministry’s spokesperson Khaled Shamal told AFP that Iraq’s water reserves were at their lowest in 80 years after a dry rainy season.
In the southern province of Diwaniyah, where several villages have suffered for years from water shortages, residents have recently protested, urging the government to address the scarcity affecting both drinking supplies and agriculture.
Water shortages have forced many farmers in Iraq to abandon their lands, and authorities have drastically curbed farming activity to preserve drinking water supplies.
Hundreds protest over water shortages in drought-hit Iraq
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Hundreds protest over water shortages in drought-hit Iraq
- Hundreds of Iraqis protested Friday against severe water shortages exacerbated by the summer’s sweltering heat in the central province of Babylon
- Authorities also blame upstream dams built in neighboring Iran and Turkiye for dramatically lowering the flow of the once-mighty Tigris and Euphrates, which have irrigated Iraq for millennia
Take back and prosecute your jailed Daesh militants, Iraq tells Europe
RAQQA: Baghdad on Friday urged European states to repatriate and prosecute their citizens who fought for Daesh, and who are now being moved to Iraq from detention camps in Syria.
Europeans were among 150 Daesh prisoners transferred so far by the US military from Kurdish custody in Syria. They were among an estimated 7,000 militants due to be moved across the border to Iraq as the Kurdish-led force that has held them for years relinquishes swaths of territory to the advancing Syrian army.
In a telephone call on Friday with French President Emmanuel Macron, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani said European countries should take back and prosecute their nationals.
An Iraqi security official said the 150 so far transferred to Iraq were “all leaders of the Daesh group, and some of the most notorious criminals.” They included “Europeans, Asians, Arabs and Iraqis,” he said.
Another Iraqi security source said the group comprised “85 Iraqis and 65 others of various nationalities, including Europeans, Sudanese, Somalis, and people from the Caucasus region.”
They all took part in Daesh operations in Iraq, he said, and were now being held at a prison in Baghdad.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that “non-Iraqi terrorists will be in Iraq temporarily.”
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces jailed thousands of militant fighters and detained tens of thousands of their relatives in camps as it pushed out Daesh in 2019 after five years of fighting.
