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In the early 1990’s, when the onset of economic sanctions turned Iraq into a refugee camp, people outside Iraq were horrified by stories of Iraqis forced to sell everything from their most precious belongings to their furniture in order to obtain necessities. Today in Iraq, as the occupation drags on, economic hardships are again forcing people to sell their belongings – what little they have left. When the US/UK forces invaded Iraq two and a half years ago, they attacked a country whose economy was showing small signs of life. Iraq, at the time, was improving its relations with neighboring countries; it had negotiated contracts with China and Russia, among others. Commercial and business air travel had resumed on a small scale. Business conventions were held. The invasion put an end to that, replacing it with violence, creating conditions that are indeed not unlike a refugee camp. In a refugee camp, typically, hardship is a way of life. There is no formal economy. Instead people depend largely on handouts. Disease threatens, especially children. Services are makeshift and likely to fail. The future promises little in the way of improvements. In a study entitled, “Living Conditions in Iraq,” the UN Development Program and the Iraqi Ministry of Planning and Development report an “alarming deterioration in living conditions” since the US/UK invasion.
The following articles cover a wide range of issues facing people in Iraq: the shortage of rations upon which most people depend; the shortfall of electrical power as the heat of summer descends; water-pollution and water-borne infectious disease; threats to children in Iraq; the bombing of infrastructure, including water and oil pipelines; the Mayor of Baghdad threatening to resign over a lack of funds for services; outbreak of TB in Amarah; lack of treatment for people with leprosy; military attacks on hospitals; planned increases in Iraqi doctors’ salaries; major displacements of people in Western Iraq in advance of US military offensives; child labor; illegal trade in human organs; and last, but not least, good times for Halliburton as it acquires another multi-billion dollar contract for work in Iraq.
Suggestions for improving this Digest, including its content and format, are welcome. Contact David Smith-Ferri (smithferri at pacific.net) or Scott Blackburn (Scott at vitw.org)
Iraqis struggle to make ends meet as food rations shrink
Progress in Iraqi freedom stained by growing hardship
Children of Iraq: A Face of Grief as War Takes Toll
Report: Living conditions in Iraq ‘tragic’
JORDAN: NGO’s reaffirm commitment to Iraq
21 Dead, 40 Wounded in Guerrilla Violence
IRAQ: Poor power supply infrastructure threatens lives
Iraq needs $15bn to fix water supply
Iraqi rebels bomb Baghdad water pipeline at height of summer
Baghdad Faces Brutal Heat With Less Power
Baghdad mayor threatens to resign over lack of funds
Child Abuse
Humanitarian concerns rise as Iraq offensives continue
IRAQ: Leprosy treatment in the south very poor - officials
IRAQ: Doctors’ salaries set to improve
Iraqi hospitals in the firing line
Iraqi Hospitals Attacked And Damaged By Us Forces
Mortar attack disrupts Baghdad water supply
IRAQ: Attacks on oil facilities cost US $12 billion
IRAQ: Focus on child labour
IRAQ: New campaign to control brucellosis
IRAQ: Tests continuing on contaminated wheat
Much-needed emergency medical supplies arrive in Najaf
IRAQ: Hundreds of displaced from al-Qaim in need of supplies
IRAQ: Focus on illegal organ trade
Halliburton bags another Iraq contract
Iraqis struggle to make ends meet as food rations shrink
By Louise Roug, Times Staff Writer
June 17 2005
After his American employers left and monthly food rations began to shrink, Hussein Hadi started selling his furniture. His bed was the last thing to go. Now Hadi, his wife, sister, mother, two brothers, three children and a nephew sleep on his living- room floor in Baghdad, their blankets sewn from flour sacks. Some nights they fall asleep hungry.
“Hope is small,” said his wife, Zainab. Like many Iraqis, the Hadis depend on food rations distributed by the government. Sometimes the sugar they receive has been hardened by rainwater and the rice is crawling with maggots. The soap is so harsh it causes rashes. On the rare occasions when the Hadis received all the items - sugar, rice, flour, baby milk, tea, vegetable oil and a few other essentials - they thought themselves lucky.
The United Nations World Food Programme, which monitors the distribution of rations, recently reported “significant countrywide shortfalls in rice, sugar, milk and infant formula”.
Families in Baghdad have received no sugar or baby milk since January. Newspapers have also begun reporting that the tea and flour hand-outs contain metal filings and that people have fallen ill after consuming food rations.
Officials with the trade ministry, which is in charge of distributing the rations, said the media have created the crisis. But they have refused to release results of the tests for contamination they said they are doing. Retail agents who sell the food baskets say the ministry is corrupt, a charge supported by Radhi Radhi, the government’s anti-corruption chief.
Mr Radhi said in a recent interview that trade ministry officials had spread rumours of contaminated food to discredit the current flour supplier and renegotiate the contract. Some agents speculate that ministry employees have added metal filings to cheat on the parcels’ weight. The same employees also sell tea and flour on the black market, agents say.
Like the Hadis, many Iraqi families rely on the heavily subsidised rations, which were previously distributed under the United Nations’ oil-for-food programme to mitigate the effect of sanctions after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. After the removal of Saddam Hussein, the programme was handed over to the trade ministry.
More than half of Iraq’s population lives below the poverty line. The median income fell from $255 (£144, ?211) in 2003 to about $144 in 2004, according to a recent UN survey. Families buy the food baskets for a few dollars at state-licensed shops.
Ahmed Mukhtar, director-general of the ministry, blamed the shortage of rations on security threats that created bottlenecks at the borders with Jordan, Syria and Turkey. “We’re attempting to make sure the supplies are safely delivered,” Mr Mukhtar said. “Anything that disturbs the food supplies is a critical situation.”
Zainab Hadi said she and other women had been forced to buy food at the market, pushing prices up. The cost of tea and flour has almost tripled. At food markets, a 35-pound can of vegetable oil, which just a few months ago cost $4 - a little more than an average day’s wage - now costs $12. Mr Hadi recently lost his job as an electrical engineer with US troops and now works as a minibus driver.
Over the doorway of the Hadis’ tiny house, a small blue ceramic plaque offers praise to God. The 10 family members share two rooms. The upstairs living room doubles as a bedroom. In their kitchen, a poster of the Shia Muslim martyr Hussein shares pride of place with a world map. The fridge is largely empty. Sprite and Coke bottles filled with tap water share shelf space with medicine to relieve the aching joints of Hadi’s widowed mother.
In Sadr City, a Baghdad slum into which 2m people are crammed, the reduction in food rations is also taking a toll. Intisan Karim, 26, lives with 24 family members in a small house. If rations continue to shrink, she joked, laughing without mirth, “we’ll start eating each other”.
Outside sewage flowed along the streets; goats gnawed on rubbish.
“The food basket is shrinking and the people’s hopes are also shrinking,” said Amir Huseini, who dealt with social issues in an office affiliated with Moqtada al-Sadr, the anti-American Shia cleric.
“One or two missing items have become three, four and five, until this point when the really vital item - the flour - is also missing.”
He had visited many families locally, trying to raise morale and hope, he said, “although this does not fill the stomachs of the hungry”.
Progress in Iraqi freedom stained by growing hardship
By David Cortright
NOTRE DAME, IND. - The Bush administration continues to insist that progress is being made in Iraq, but the last two years have brought deepening misery for Iraqis. That is the inescapable conclusion of a report released in May by the UN Development Program (UNDP) and the Iraqi Ministry of Planning and Development Cooperation.
The “Living Conditions in Iraq” study is based on a 2004 survey of more than 21,000 households. It shows the Iraqi people are suffering widespread death and war-related injury, high rates of infant and child mortality, chronic malnutrition and illness among children, low rates of life expectancy, and significant setbacks for women.
The Iraqi people were already suffering serious hardships when the war began - the result of Saddam Hussein’s policies and 13 years of UN sanctions. Since the US invasion, the report notes an “alarming deterioration” in living conditions.
The innocent and vulnerable populations of Iraq are suffering the most. Malnutrition among small children is widespread. Nearly one quarter of Iraqi children suffer chronic malnutrition, and 8 percent suffer acute malnutrition.
Illness levels among Iraqi children are also high - due in part to a growing lack of safe drinking water and sanitation. Forty percent of urban households report sewage in the streets of their neighborhoods.
Infant and child mortality rates remain abnormally high in Iraq, though there is much uncertainty about the exact numbers.
The overall trend, however, is unmistakable: a rise in infant and child mortality rates over the past 15 years.
This contrasts with the global trend - reflected by Iraq’s neighbors - of steadily falling infant and child mortality rates over the past few decades.
Iraq’s alarmingly high child mortality rate translates into thousands of ‘excess’ deaths every year. These are the quiet, unseen victims of the continuing tragedy in Iraq.
The new report also sheds light on the number of Iraqi deaths directly attributable to the US-led invasion and occupation. As of mid-2004 the war had caused 24,000 Iraqi deaths, the study estimated. This is the number for all deaths, civilian and military, in the immediate aftermath of the 2003 invasion.
The death toll in Iraq has continued to climb, of course, especially in recent weeks, so these numbers are larger now than when the survey was conducted last year.
War has caused widespread injury and disability in Iraq. Most of those injured in earlier wars were soldiers, but the victims of the current war are more likely to be women, children, and the elderly. Among Iraqis, the number of children injured since the US invasion is higher than the number of military-aged men.
There’s striking evidence of the insecurity of daily life in Iraq.
Gun shots and weapons fire are common - 37 percent of respondents said such activity occurred daily in their neighborhoods; 23 percent said it occurred several times a week.
Public insecurity has especially serious consequences for Iraqi women - the survey found that nearly half “think the security in their area has worsened” compared with one year ago.This causes an increasing number of women to stay at home, thus reinforcing a decade-long trend of declining levels of education and literacy among women.
“The security situation is a major obstacle to individual freedom in women’s everyday life,” states the report.
Years of war and sanctions have devastated Iraqi society and caused widespread malnutrition, illness, and premature death.
The resulting public-health crisis has lowered life opportunities for the entire population. “The probability of dying before the age of 40 for Iraqi children born between 2000 and 2005 is estimated at 18 percent; approximately three times the level in neighboring Jordan and Syria,” states the new report.
During the 1990s a worldwide humanitarian outcry rose in response to reports of Iraqi babies dying because of sanctions. It is time for a new public outcry now, to demand urgently needed humanitarian relief for the Iraqi people.
David Cortright is president of the Fourth Freedom Forum and a senior research fellow at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
Children of Iraq: A Face of Grief as War Takes Toll
June 2, 2005
by César Chelala
More than two years after the start of the war in Iraq, children continue to be its main victims. At the same time, the health of the majority of the population continues to deteriorate. In the 1980s, Iraq had one of the best health-care systems in the region; today, it cannot respond to the health needs of the population. This is the third time in the last 25 years - after the war with Iran from 1980 to 1988 and the Gulf War in 1991 - that Iraqi civilians, mostly children, have suffered the consequences of war. This is happening in a country where almost half of the inhabitants are younger than 18.
In 1991, there were 1,800 health-care centers in Iraq. More than a decade later, that number is almost half, and almost a third of them require major rehabilitation. On the United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Index, the country has fallen from 96 to 127, one of the most dramatic declines in human welfare in recent history.
According to Jean Ziegler, the United Nations Human Rights Commission’s special expert on the right to food, the rate of malnutrition among Iraqi children has almost doubled since Saddam Hussein’s ouster in April 2003. Today, at 7.7 percent, Iraq’s child malnutrition rate is now roughly equal to that of Burundi, an African nation ravaged by more than a decade of war. It is far higher than the rates in Uganda and Haiti, countries also devastated by unrelenting violence.
The population health problems are dramatically different from those facing young Iraqis a generation ago, when obesity was one of the main nutrition-related public health concerns. High rates of malnutrition started in the 1990s, following U.N. sanctions to punish the Saddam Hussein regime for invading Kuwait in 1990. But following the 2003 invasion by the coalition forces, a constant cycle of insurgent violence and occupation forces’ counterattacks have significantly damaged the basic health infrastructure in the country.
Lack of dependable electricity and shortages of potable water throughout the country compound the deterioration of the population’s health, along with outbreaks of cholera and typhoid fever, particularly in southern Iraq. The collapse of the water and sewage systems has also been the probable cause of an outbreak of hepatitis, particularly lethal to pregnant women.
According to one estimate, 60 percent of rural residents and 20 percent of urban dwellers have access only to contaminated water. In the hardest hit regions, more than 70 percent of primary-school buildings lack potable water. (According to World Bank statistics, 25 percent of primary school-age children in Iraq do not go to school. Ministry of Education statistics state that 80 percent of the schools need repair and 9 percent are in need of demolition.)
Hundreds of thousands of children born since the beginning of the present war have had none of their required vaccinations, and routine immunization services in major areas of the country are all but disrupted. Destruction of refrigeration systems needed to store vaccines have rendered the vaccine supply virtually useless.
Even antibiotics of minimal cost are in short supply, increasing the population’s risk of dying from common infections. Hospitals are overcrowded, and many hospitals go dark at night for lack of lighting fixtures. The Iraqi minister of health claims that 100 percent of the hospitals in Iraq need rehabilitation.
To compound the problem, international aid organizations such as Doctors Without Borders and CARE International have closed their operations in Iraq because of the threat of violence. Both groups have traditionally had a high tolerance for risk and a remarkable record of cooperation with public-health authorities in the country.
The Center for Strategic and International studies, a Washington research group, recently assessed five sectors of Iraq’s reconstruction: security, governance and participation, economic opportunity, services and social wellness. The center concluded that health care is the sector deteriorating most rapidly. As a result of all these public-health failures, Iraq is the country that has progressed least in reducing child mortality since the 1990s.
Adults play their perverse war games, and children suffer. This is a severe indictment of any war - and of those who orchestrate war without assessing its potential consequences on the most vulnerable of civilian populations.
César Chelala (cchelala@aol.com) is an international health consultant.
Report: Living conditions in Iraq ‘tragic’
2004 Survey reveals 85% of Iraqi households lack stable electricity, 54% have access to clean water.
BAGHDAD - The Iraqi people are suffering from a desperate lack of jobs, housing, health care and electricity, according to a survey by Iraqi authorities and the United Nations released on Thursday. Planning Minister Barham Saleh, during a ceremony in Baghdad, blamed the dire living conditions in most of the country on decades of war but also on the shortcomings of the international community. “The survey, in a nutshell, depicts a rather tragic situation of the quality of life in Iraq,” Saleh said in English at the event, attended by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s deputy representative in Iraq, Staffan de Mistura. The 370-page report entitled “Iraq Living Conditions Survey 2004″ was conducted over the past year on a representative sample of 22,000 families in all of Iraq’s 18 provinces. Eighty-five percent of Iraqi households lacked stable electricity when the survey was carried out. Only 54 percent had access to clean water and 37 percent to sewage. “If you compare this to the situation in the 1980s, you will see a major deterioration of the situation,” said the newly-appointed minister, pointing out that 75 percent of households had clean water two decades ago. The report “shows a contrast between the potential of Iraq, with all the human and natural resources that we have, and the unfortunate lack of development and lack of quality of life we are suffering from,” Saleh said. The survey put the unemployment figure at 18.4 percent, but Saleh explained that “under-employment” topped the 50-percent mark.
JORDAN: NGO’s reaffirm commitment to Iraq
14 Jun 2005 13:26:12 GMT
AMMAN, 13 June (IRIN) - NGOs working in Iraq have agreed on the need for stronger advocacy and the need to create safe space for humanitarian work, following a conference held in the Jordanian capital, Amman.
“We (NGOs) aim to provide independent and universal humanitarian and development assistance solely based on Iraqi people’s needs, rights and interests,” Kasra Mofarah, executive coordinator of the NGO Coordination Committee for Iraq (NCCI) said.
The conference and two-day workshop, which ended on Thursday, was convened to look at how successful NGO work in Iraq has been over the past two years given the poor security situation in the country.
“We are now working on a plan to regain humanitarian space,” he added.
Some 70 NGOs and 44 representatives from UN agencies and donors took part in the event.
Aid workers have been facing increasing threats in the country and reconstruction work has been severely hampered by bombings, shootings, kidnappings and constant threats. Many aid agencies have pulled out of the country and are providing what assistance they can from neighbouring countries, including Jordan.
Since September 2004, 15 NGO employees have been killed and 20 wounded by insurgents. A large number have also been detained by US-led coalition forces and by Iraqi authorities.
According to Mofarah, the lack of humanitarian aid and reconstruction at a time when the country needs it most, has had a huge impact on ordinary Iraqis.
“There is less electricity, less food, poor health facilities, insecurity and less access to basic needs,” said Mofarah.
Participants voiced their commitment and confidence in the ability of NCCI to produce a work-plan to protect aid workers within two months, he added.
The work-plan will include proposals to regain unrestricted access to affected communities without being targeted by either side in the conflict.
“We are independent, neutral and impartial aid workers, without any link to the political agenda and the line between the military and aid workers is blurred now,” Mofarah stressed.
21 Dead, 40 Wounded in Guerrilla Violence
Juan Cole
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
Reuters reports, “Iraqi doctors say they are concerned over an increase in Tuberculosis (TB) cases in the southeastern city of Amarah, fueled by a shortage of medicine and poor living conditions.” Iraqi governments during the past 50 years had gotten the problem under control in that region.
IRAQ: Poor power supply infrastructure threatens lives
IRIN
08 Jun 2005
BAGHDAD, 8 June (IRIN) - With the onset of summer in Iraq there are increasing concerns that erratic power supplies could have a serious impact on the health of the local population.
Doctors in the capital, Baghdad, have pointed to a spike in the number of patients suffering dehydration and already three deaths have been reported among the elderly. During the summer months temperatures in Iraq sometime reach around 50 degrees Celsius.
“Every day we see an increase in the number of people looking for our services due to health problems caused by the lack of power,” Dr Abbas Shaker, a clinician at Yarmouk hospital, told IRIN. Shaker explained that children and the elderly were most vulnerable to dehydration, especially if their homes do not have a cooling system.
Communities have called on the government to act quickly in order to prevent further casualties.
“My two sons are suffering from dehydration in the hospital because we cannot afford generators or buy a fan to cool our house,” Salua Hassan told IRIN at the Paediatrician Teaching Hospital in Baghdad.
The erratic power supply has also taken a toll on businesses in the capital.
“I have stopped bringing meat and other frozen stuff to my shop because I was losing a lot of food due to the power shortages. I have lost many clients because I cannot afford a generator to supply all my refrigerators,” Teif Muhammad, a Baghdad shopkeeper said.
United States officials have said that while they will continue to play a supporting role in rebuilding Iraq’s electricity system, the bulk of the reconstruction work is the responsibility of the Ministry of Electricity(MoE).
Even before the US-led invasion in 2003, Iraq did not produce enough power to meet demand, which ranged between 3,000 and 6,500 megawatts, depending on the weather.
According to Brookings Institution-Iraq Index, updated in March 2005, the average output was 4,400 megawatts during March 2003, the month preceding the coalition occupation.
The former president, Saddam Hussein, had reportedly drained power from other parts of the country to serve Baghdad, which on average received electricity for 20 hours daily. Some provinces in the south had to make do with less than six hours of power per day.
The MoE has assured residents of ongoing efforts to beef up the power supply.
“We are working hard to boost power-generation capacity to 5,500 megawatts per month from the current 3,700-megawatt level,” Ra’ad Shalal, a senior MoE official told IRIN.
Shalal went on to warn that in the coming summer months, electricity demand could reach levels of 8,250 megawatts. He said there were plans to provide electricity on a rotating basis, with three hour breaks during the day and at night.
Iraq needs $15bn to fix water supply
Tuesday 28 June 2005
Iraq, the land of two rivers that once irrigated the world’s earliest civilisations, needs up to $15 billion to repair a dilapidated water system crippled by war and neglect, the country’s water minister said on Tuesday.
More than two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the country of the Euphrates and the Tigris is struggling with recurrent water shortages in Baghdad and other large cities, poor sanitation and a shattered irrigation network.
Water Resources Minister Latif Rashid said fighters intent on undermining the new government are much to blame for the current water crisis and said pledged reconstruction money has been slow to materialise.
“Iraq is a country rich in water resources. We have large reservoirs, two large rivers, a large number of river branches, adequate ground water, the marshland area,” Rashid said on the sidelines of a reconstruction conference in Amman, Jordan.
“What Iraq needs is large investments.”
Rashid said the bill for repairing and building dams, irrigation canals, sewage systems and purification stations for drinking water amounts to somewhere between $10 and $15 billion.
Daily attacks
The United States earmarked $3.7 billion to help rebuild Iraq’s water system but a large part of that cash has been cut back, swallowed by security cuts, he said.
“They have started some projects in our ministry. I think we are getting probably a total cost for the projects of $400 million and they have started spending that amount of money,” Rashid said.
A donors’ meeting is scheduled for next month in Amman.
Last week, two million Baghdadis went without fresh water after officials said fighters sabotaged one of the main water plants that feeds the Iraqi capital, where summer temperatures can top 50C.
“We suffer daily from terrorists sabotaging our infrastructure. There was serious damage in Baghdad … but most of it has been repaired,” Rashid said.
Water and electricity shortages are draining residents’ confidence in the new Shia-led government, elected five months ago in polls many hoped would bring order and good governance.
Management issues
Iraq needs an estimated 15,000 megawatts of power a day but it only generates 5000 megawatts, according to Rashid.
Liqaa Maki, an Iraq analyst, told Aljazeera.net that the Iraqi government and foreign donors must share the blame for water shortages.
“In over half the cities and towns in Iraq there hasn’t been a single explosion in more than two years, but in these places there are still major problems,” he said.
“The fact is that we are just not seeing any real investment in the water infrastructure.”
He added: “In the town of al-Rumaitha (north of Baghdad) there has not been a single bombing or killing in over two years and there has never been a problem with the water supply in decades.
“But this week the government cut off water to the entire region which subsequently provoked demonstrations. How can the government blame the resistance for these problems when it is obviously a result of bad management and a lack of investment?”
Iraqi rebels bomb Baghdad water pipeline at height of summer
AFP]
Thu Jul 7
BAGHDAD (AFP) - At the height of summer, Iraqi rebels bombed a water pipeline feeding Baghdad, cutting off supplies to half the city in the third such attack in three weeks.
The pipeline carries water to Karkh, on the west side of the capital, where temperatures currently top 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit).
“The pipeline linking the Tarmiyah pumping station to the capital was sabotaged,” an official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
“We are going to the site to evaluate the damage,” he added Thursday.
On July 1, rebels bombed the Tarmiyah pumping station and repairs took four days.
On June 19, the Taji purification station, north of the capital, was bombed and required a fortnight to be repaired. About a million people were without drinking water for four days.
Baghdad’s 6.5 million population is often victim to water shortages because of the poor state of installations. Some 97 percent of inhabitants have running water, but only 63 percent get it on a regular basis, according to UN figures.
The United States has poured some two billion dollars to fund reconstruction projects in the capital over the past 18 months, but a significant amount goes to ensuring security for the projects, according to a senior US military officer.
Speaking before the latest attack, the officer, who declined to be named, said such attacks suggested a “new turn in strategy” for rebels who are out to disrupt essential services to the capital.
He pointed to two other assaults on the city’s water supply and to a recent bombing of a gas pipeline south of the city, which is still on fire.
Baghdad Faces Brutal Heat With Less Power
By OMAR SINAN, Associated Press Writer
Mon Jul 4, 4:55 AM ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq - In a toss-up between dodging bullets or staying indoors at night and sweating through Baghdad’s stifling summer heat, Mohsin Mohammed and his family have opted to risk the bullets.
The 53-year-old taxi driver, his wife and their 6-year-old daughter, like many of the Iraqi capital’s residents, sleep on the roof of their house, risking being hit by a stray bullet or mortar fired by one of the country’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of insurgents.
They have few other options. Power outages that occur several times a day make fans and air conditions largely useless. Only the night air brings a mild reprieve from daytime temperatures that can soar up to 125 degrees Fahrenheit.
“It was a hot and dusty day. I am sure a breeze will pass over and help us sleep,” said his wife, Ameera, shrugging off Mohammed’s worries of thieves or stray bullets.
Such choices have become a fact of life in post-war Iraq. But they also underscore the challenges confronting the new Iraqi government, which has struggled to restore reliable power service to the city at a time when demand is soaring because of air conditioners and insurgent attacks on the infrastructure continue unabated.
According to figures compiled by the Brookings Institute, Iraqi power plants generated an average of 4,293 megawatts of electricity in June 2004. Last month, that figure dropped to 4,035 megawatts, the Washington-based institute said.
Both figures are well below the target of 6,000 megawatts a month that officials set for July 2004.
Officials blame insurgents for much of the problem.
Rebels have targeted oil lines, electricity plants and other infrastructure projects vital to Iraq’s reconstruction, delaying the rebuilding, raising costs and discouraging skilled foreign workers from coming to a war-ravaged country where they could be kidnapped and killed.
Some experts say while Iraq needs to attract foreign investors to help rebuild the electricity sector, power companies are loath to do business here because power costs are so low and the risk to engineers and workers is high.
Before the U.S.-led invasion, Baghdad residents enjoyed about 20 hours of electricity a day, although U.S. officials say supplies in provincial cities were much lower.
Today, residents of the capital receive power for about 10 hours a day, usually broken into two-hour chunks.
Some, like Saad al-Samarraei, are lucky enough to have swimming pools and powerful generators that keep the air conditioners humming.
Al-Samarraei, an affluent Sunni Arab who lives in the Azamiyah district of north Baghdad, owns a hefty generator and an outdoor swimming pool that sits behind his home. Most of the family prefers the pool since the generator’s loud grinding is an annoyance.
“It’s a great gift having this quiet and cool choice, since we don’t have to tolerate the smoky and earsplitting engine,” al-Samarraei’s 22-year-old son Hussam said before taking a dip.
For Mohammed, the taxi driver, and the overwhelming majority of Baghdad residents, however, the generator and pool are the stuff of dreams. Improvisation is a must.
In the Shiite slum of Sadr City, a mother pours water over four toddlers squeezed into a tiny plastic wash basin. They scream with glee as the water streams over their faces.
“They love it,” their mother Fadhilah Zghaiyer said.
Some refuge can also be found before the Baghdad’s 11 p.m. curfew in ice-cream shops, some of which have generators. But the constant threat of suicide bombers targeting these shops where security forces mingle with civilians has made even getting a cup of pistachio ice-cream a potentially life-ending gamble.
At the Sea Dog ice-cream shop in eastern Baghdad, dozens have braved the danger for a scoop or two of their favorite flavor.
Customers sit chatting on benches set up outside, and Mohammed’s daughter Noor - her hands sticky from the melting treat - holds a cone with three scoops.
“It’s nice out here, but the generator’s blare disturbs us,” her mother Ameera said.
The heavily-fortified Jadriyah Lake complex along the Tigris River’s eastern bank is another retreat filled with restaurants, parks, cafeterias and fish vendors. There is no lack of electricity, but a $2 entrance fee and high prices at restaurants deter many poor families.
But for those who can afford it, the complex offers one of the safest places in the city to escape the heat.
“This is the only isolated and safe place we can go to when we don’t have electricity,” said Maha Abbas, a 39-year-old Iraqi housewife.
The fun ends with nightfall and the approaching curfew - the time when the power usually goes out in many neighborhoods.
For 6-year-old Noor, the outage also brings the frustration of not being able to watch her favorite cartoons on television before bed. It’s a problem here father takes care of by taking her for a ride in the car until she feels drowsy and falls asleep.
Baghdad mayor threatens to resign over lack of funds
Compiled by Daily Star staff
Friday, July 01, 2005
Baghdad’s mayor threatened to resign if the government fails to provide the funds and support needed to implement development projects in the capital, complaining Baghdadis were suffering from water shortages. Meanwhile, an Iraqi politician received death threats a day after launching a party that would represent the “resistance.”
In a bid to improve relations with its neighbor, a delegation sent by Damascus met with Deputy Foreign Minister, Hamid al-Bayyati, to discuss preparations for the reopening of the Syrian Embassy in Baghdad. Bayyati’s office declined to give details on the meeting.
“It’s useless for any official to stay in office without having the means to accomplish his job,” Baghdad Mayor Alaa Mahmoud al-Timimi said in a news conference.
He said President Jalal Talabani and Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari had promised him to secure the needed funds.
Timimi’s spokesman Ameer Ali Hassoun later said the municipality had requested $1.5 billion for the 2005 fiscal year but only received $85 million.
Timimi had first threatened to leave office about two months ago, Hassoun said, adding the mayor put off leaving his position because of the promises he received from the government.
Hassoun said the municipality was trying to expand its water projects to meet demand.
“We have to confess that Baghdad suffers a shortage in water,” Timimi said. “The problem is escalating.”
Earlier this month, a rocket attack on a water pipeline near Baghdad left millions in the capital without enough water. Some Baghdad residents complain the water they now get smells bad.
Timimi said the pipeline had been repaired and the water levels were expected to return to normal in the coming days. But he added that shortages existed even before the pipeline sabotage and were expected to continue even after it was fixed.
“I am part of the government and aware of the problems the country is facing,” Timimi said. “But I need to have technical support from the concerned parties at the government. The people are blaming me and the Baghdad municipality.”
Separately, a joint statement allegedly issued by three militant groups on an Islamic Web site said fighters would target former cabinet member Ayham al-Samarie for spreading lies, after he announced the creation of the National Council for Unity and Construction of Iraq to give representation to “legitimate resistance.”
“We announce that it’s allowed to spill the blood of Ayham Samarie. We have been too patient with his lies and we used to just deny them and provide the facts. But this isn’t working anymore,” the statement said, adding that it was issued by the Ansar al-Sunna army, the Islamic Army in Iraq and the Army of the Mujahideen. Its authenticity could not be verified.
Elsewhere, hundreds of U.S. marines, soldiers and sailors, along with Iraqi forces, scoured the Euphrates valley west of the city of Ramadi for insurgents as part of an anti-insurgency sweep west of Baghdad dubbed “Operation Sword.” - Agencies
Child Abuse
The Moscow Times
By Chris Floyd
June 24, 2005
When the public liars sat down together — in Crawford, in the Pentagon, in the Oval Office, at 10 Downing Street — and very deliberately, very guilefully and very knowingly devised their act of mass murder in Iraq, it is unlikely they gave any thought to the most vulnerable targets of their war crime: the children. So in considering this aspect of the bloodbath, we should give the liars the benefit of the doubt. Let’s not make them more monstrous than they are. Let’s stick to the facts.
Let us say — as the incontrovertible facts compel us to say — that they were willing to kill tens of thousands of innocent people in an action they knew to be illegal, reckless, ill-planned and unsupported by evidence; that they knew their public statements about the plans for war were lies; that they started the war with a vicious bombing campaign months before obtaining even a fig leaf of approval from their respective legislatures, a clear and treasonous violation of their own national laws; that long before their blitzkrieg rolled across the border, they were already divvying up the loot of conquest: the oil rights, the “privatizations,” the crony contracts.
In short, let us say that, yes, they are killers, liars, thieves and incompetent fools. But let’s not imagine that as they settled their safe and cosseted backsides into the fine upholstery of their elegantly appointed war rooms, they gleefully regaled each other with visions of the exquisite tortures they would soon inflict upon the children of Iraq.
Let’s not imagine George W. Bush nudging Tony Blair in the ribs as they masticated their pork together, saying, “Cholera, eh? Typhoid fever. Malnutrition! By God, we can grind these Iraqi children lower than the slum rats of Haiti!” Let’s not picture Dick Cheney chiding Donald Rumsfeld over the steak tartare: “Damn it, Don, if there’s a single pregnant Iraqi woman left without hepatitis before we’re through, heads are going to roll! I want the wombs of those Arab cows swimming in lethal viruses. Lethal, do you hear me?”
Of course it wasn’t like that. Such suppositions do these honored national leaders a grave injustice. No doubt their discourse was elevated, focused on lofty matters of state and strategy, on the practicalities of logistics and presentation. If anyone there spoke of the “human factor” — the actual reality of bleeding flesh, of death, wounds, disease and rot — it would only have been as part of the political calculations: What level of casualties would the American people accept, how do we keep the dead and maimed out of the public eye? It was all about numbers, processes, abstractions. Nothing to disturb the moral imagination, nothing to put them off the hearty meals and tasty snacks discreetly laid before them by the servants.
So when leading international agencies — including the World Bank, now headed by one of the chief liars, Paul Wolfowitz — find that Iraq’s children are dwindling and dying twice as fast under the coalition’s benevolent care than under the despotism of Saddam Hussein, we should not conclude that this was the liars’ conscious intention. Yes, it’s true that Iraq’s child malnutrition rate is now worse than the broken nations of Uganda or Haiti, as the Japan Times reports. Yes, cholera and typhoid are cutting swaths through the population, with especial virulence in the “stable” areas of the Shiite south. Yes, epidemics of hepatitis are killing pregnant women. Yes, antibiotics are scarce, leaving children, the old and the weak to die of common infections — that is, when they can get treated at all in a health system ravaged by the liars’ war and its atrocious aftermath. (Such as the destruction of Fallujah, for example, when coalition forces deliberately destroyed the city’s health clinics and imprisoned doctors to prevent news of civilian casualties from leaking to the press, as the Pentagon’s own “information specialists” told The New York Times.)
And yes, it’s true that Iraq — once a modern and prosperous nation — has suffered “one of the most dramatic declines in human welfare in recent history” during the occupation, as the UN says. But again, this was not part of the liars’ deliberate design. The torment of children was outside the parameters of their “metrics of success.” It was not a factor one way or the other.
In fact, let’s go even further and declare forthrightly that if the liars could have established a client regime and a permanent military presence in Iraq without harming the hair of a single child, they would have done so. If they could have transferred more than $300 billion from the public treasury to the pockets of their family members and business partners without having to concoct a brutal and baseless war of aggression, they would have done so. If they could have legitimized their radical, rapacious domestic agenda without engineering the slaughter of innocent people in order to assume the politically expedient role of “wartime leaders,” they would have done so.
But they couldn’t. So like all murderers, they did whatever they had to do to get what they wanted, regardless of the consequences for others. Like all terrorists, they rationalized their atrocities with noble rhetoric, citing the unassailable righteousness of their cause as justification for the unspeakable evil they were unleashing. And like all abusers of innocent children, they covered up their baser motives with self-serving lies.
Humanitarian concerns rise as Iraq offensives continue
6,000 families are displaced in push, officials say
Los Angeles Times
By Borzou Daragahi
July 1, 2005
BAGHDAD — As US-led offensives on insurgent strongholds continue, Iraqi humanitarian officials are expressing concerns about increasing problems for civilians in cities across the country’s vast western desert.
US forces announced the detention yesterday of more than a dozen suspected insurgents in the city of Hit during the latest in a series of operations meant to disrupt rebel activity in Iraq’s volatile Anbar province. US military officials said they had taken control of Hit this week without incident.
In other recent offensives in Anbar province and along the Syrian border, US Marines said they killed at least 47 insurgents through June 22.
The Iraqi Red Crescent Society says 6,000 families have been displaced across Anbar province in the fighting and are suffering in heat that regularly exceeds 110 degrees. The society has dispatched five convoys carrying relief supplies including tents and medical equipment to the region over the past few days.
Medical teams are assessing potential cholera outbreaks caused by bodies buried in rubble.
“It’s a tragedy,” said Ferdous Abadi, spokeswoman for the society. “There is a shortage of medical supplies and clean water.”
The society is the local equivalent of the Red Cross. Its president, Dr. Said Hakki, is an adviser on humanitarian affairs to Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.
The US military did not respond to questions about the humanitarian situation. It has maintained in news releases that displaced families have begun to return home.
According to a report Wednesday by the Honolulu-based Center of Excellence in Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance, a US organization that coordinates civilian and military humanitarian operations worldwide, about 7,000 Karabileh residents were displaced in recent operations.
A medical official in the region said authorities had gathered the corpses of dozens of people killed in fighting over the last week. Dr. Munaim Aften, director of Ramadi Hospital, said he had taken possession of at least 50 bodies discovered in and around sites of fighting in Qaim and Karabileh. The bodies included those of three women as well as four men with Egyptian passports, he said.
Some bodies had been mutilated beyond recognition, he said.
A security official who recently returned from Ramadi said the corpses had overburdened the local morgue. “Everyone stayed away from the hospital because of the smell of decaying bodies,” said the official, who asked to remain anonymous because he feared retribution from insurgents.
Elsewhere across Iraq, insurgents continued their campaign to intimidate Iraqi security forces.
In Baghdad, gunmen killed the cousin of national security adviser Mowafak al-Rubaie. The victim, Taher Kadhem al-Rubayee, was working at his eyeglass shop in the Ameriyah district last night when gunmen stormed in and killed him, an employee, and three customers, an interior ministry official said.
In Baqubah, 45 miles north of the capital, gunmen in a Daewoo sedan attempted to assassinate Colonel Shalaan Abdul-Khaleq, head of the city’s elite Rapid Intervention Force. The colonel’s brother and two civilians were killed in ensuing hourlong gunfight. Khaleq was severely wounded.
In Hawija, a Sunni-dominated city southwest of Kirkuk, an Iraqi Army officer who was kidnapped Tuesday was found dead, police said.
US forces have launched several offensives over the last month in Sunni Arab stretches of the country in an attempt to disrupt insurgent activity. In the Karabileh operation, for example, Marines freed four hostages who they said showed signs of torture. Several bomb factories were uncovered, and 17 car bombs were disarmed.
IRAQ: Leprosy treatment in the south very poor - officials
IRIN
29 Jun 2005
AMARAH, 29 June (IRIN) - Leprosy patients in the south of the country have been suffering from a lack of medical assistance and poor living conditions according to health officials. They have been confined to a five-room quarantine hospital built from cement bricks without sanitation or power located in Butaiyrah district, 50 km north of the city of Amarah, in the southern Missan governorate.
Leprosy is a chronic but curable disease caused by a bacillus which is not highly infectious. It is transmitted via droplets, from the nose and mouth during close and frequent contact with untreated people. It mainly attacks the skin and nerves causing gross disfiguration and disability if left untreated.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over the past 20 years, there have been more than 12 million leprosy patients worldwide. The disease has been eliminated from 108 of the 122 countries where it was considered a serious public health issue in 1985.
But the Ministry of Health (MoH) says that nearly 400 people are currrently living with leprosy in Iraq.
Dr Zamil Mohammed al-Mohamdawi, head of the Health Directorate in Amarah, told IRIN that they have been facing many difficulties in dealing with leprosy patients.
“We have appointed medical support and two assistants to take care of the patients in quarantine. But there are no refrigerators to keep the medicine and there is no electricity and water either,” al-Mohamdawi said. “We have asked the governorate of Amarah for support but there has been no response yet and even the generator, we had bought for them, has been stolen by thieves,” he added.
The unit has not received any supplies of leprosy drugs since the war to oust Saddam Hussein began in March 2003, officials said.
During Hussein’s regime, the quarantine department had 24 temporary patients and nearly 90 temporary ones. The government was supporting the patients with medical supplies but little else and the facility had always been in a dilapidated state.
Dr Abdullah al-Hakeem, a medical lecturer at Basra University, said that infected patients posed a real health risk and were capable of infecting many others, particularly those with leprosy at large in the wider community. With the Amarah clinic now being so poorly resourced this problem is now growing, he said.
Discrimination is another challenge faced by leprosy patients both past and present.
“Two years ago I was considered healthy and cured by local doctors. I was happy and I went to see my sons in Amarah and was expecting them to welcome me. But instead they forced me out from their houses, telling me I was a liar and was going to contaminate them, telling me never to show my face there again,” Fakhria Adday, a 51-year-old patient at the leprosy clinic said.
In the face of such prejudice, she’s back at the facility and is now exposed to the disease again.
“I do not have anywhere to go and for this reason I’m here living in the quarantine again, in the middle of the disease because at least I will be respected between patients,” she said.
WHO in the capital, Baghdad, told IRIN that they were going to send a special mission to the city to study the leprosy situation there, adding that the situation could become serious if the disease is allowed to spread.
“The disease is eating the bodies of the patients day by day. They are in a very bad psychological condition,” Dr. Abdulrazaq al-Saadi, a volunteer at the leprosy quarantine centre, said.
IRAQ: Doctors’ salaries set to improve
IRIN
29 Jun 2005
BAGHDAD, 29 June (IRIN) - The Iraqi Ministry of Health (MoH) announced this week that they are going to respond to a request from doctors to increase their salaries.
“Doctors in Iraq are still receiving insufficient salaries and their work should be respected. We expect that in the coming month their salaries will be raised according to their positions,” Jalil al-Shummary, deputy ministry of health, said.
Under Saddam Hussein’s regime, doctors in Iraq received less than US $ 20 per month. After the war that ousted him in 2003, salary increases of up to $ 200 per month were awarded to doctors. The health ministry now hopes to offer further increments of up to 200 percent.
Critics of the payment system argue that medical fees paid by patients are too low in Iraq. Private clinics in the capital charge less than $ 5 per consultation, whereas in neighbouring Jordan doctors charge as much as $100 for a similar appointment.
“Everywhere in the world doctors are one of the most respected and recognised professions with the best salaries but here in Iraq we receive about as much as a hospital cleaner,” Dr Salam al-Kubaissy, a clinician at Yarmouk hospital in Baghdad, said.
Huge numbers of qualified and experienced doctors have already left Iraq following the war in 2003 because of insecurity and poor employment opportunities in the country. The exodus has had a devastating effect on the country’s health system.
Chilling statistics from the MoH show that nearly 170 doctors have been assassinated or kidnapped over the past two years, either by insurgents or by criminals attempting to obtain ransoms for the release of their captives.
It is hoped that the increase in salaries may tempt many doctors who have left the country to return.
“We wish that as soon as we get the final approval, many doctors will start to return to the country looking for better opportunities here,” al-Shummary added.
The Ministry of Finance (MoF) was less certain where the money for the salary increases would come from.
“We understand the need for salary increases but we also have a deteriorating financial situation in the country,” explained Ali Serdawi, a senior MoF official.
News of the coming salary increase was, perhaps not surprisingly, welcomed by local doctors.
“We want to serve the population, now we feel much happier about that if this salary improvement happens, then the future is good once again,” Dr. Hadeel Fakiri, a paediatrician in a government hospital in the capital, said.
Iraqi hospitals in the firing line
Socialist Worker
7/2/05
By Dahr Jamail
Dahr Jamail uncovers disturbing evidence of how the US occupation forces are targeting medical workers
Iraqi doctors say they have been harassed, beaten, threatened and sometimes even attacked by US and US-backed Iraqi forces during recent military adventures in al-Qa’im and Haditha.
Their testimony bears witness to a horrific standard operating procedure of collective punishment against the Iraqi people.
Interference by the US military and outright hostility towards medical workers in Iraq appears to have become the norm.
This intrusion most often takes the form of soldiers entering hospitals to interrogate or detain alleged resistance fighters.
But during major assaults by US forces-such as the levelling of the city of Fallujah last November-it becomes sharper and more deadly.
US forces entered Fallujah General Hospital, the city’s only healthcare facility for trauma victims, in November shortly after razing the nearby Nazzal Emergency Hospital to the ground.
There they detained employees and patients alike. Water and electricity supplies were cut off, ambulances confiscated, and surgeons-without exception-kept out of the besieged city, according to medics on the scene.
The US military occupied Fallujah General Hospital throughout the massacre of the city. Ambulances were deliberately targeted by US forces.
Burhan Fasa’a, a cameraman with the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation, witnessed the first eight days of the fighting.
“I entered Fallujah near the Julan Quarter, which is near the General Hospital,” he said during an interview in Baghdad. “There were American snipers on top of the hospital who were shooting everyone in sight.”
The Iraqi Red Crescent had to wait a full week before being permitted to dispatch three ambulances into the city.
Similar testimony emerged from hospitals in other cities during the same period. In Amiriyat al-Fallujah, a village some ten kilometres east of Fallujah, doctors say the main hospital was raided twice by US soldiers and members of the Iraqi National Guard.
“The first time was 29 November at 5.40am, and the second time was the following day,” said one doctor at the hospital, who did not want to give his real name for fear of US reprisals.
A second doctor, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said that all of the doors of the clinics inside the same hospital were kicked in.
“The Americans have snipers all along the road between here and Fallujah,” he added. “They shoot our ambulances if they try to go to Fallujah.”
Ambulances Another glaring example of the US military impeding the medical care of Iraqis occurred during the earlier siege of Fallujah in April 2004.
Doctors from Fallujah General Hospital, as well as others who worked in clinics throughout the city during the US siege, reported that US Marines obstructed their services and that US snipers intentionally targeted their clinics and ambulances.
“The Marines said they didn’t close the hospital-but essentially that’s what they did,” said Dr Abdulla, an orthopedic surgeon at Fallujah General Hospital who spoke on condition of using a false name.
“They closed the bridge which connects us to the city and closed our road. The area in front of our hospital was full of their soldiers and vehicles.”
This procedure prevented countless patients who desperately needed medical care from receiving it, he added. “Who knows how many of them died that we could have saved.”
He also blamed the US military for shooting at civilian ambulances and shooting near the clinic where he worked. “Some days we couldn’t leave or even go near the door because of the snipers. They were shooting at the front door of the clinic.”
A doctor at al-Kerkh Hospital, speaking on condition of anonymity, shared a similar experience of the problem that appears to be rampant throughout much of the country.
“We hear of Americans removing wounded Iraqis from hospitals. They are always coming here and asking us if we have injured fighters.”
Emergency The World Health Organisation last year warned of a health emergency in Baghdad, and throughout Iraq, if current conditions persist.
Iraq’s ministry of health claims to have received promises of over $1 billion in US funding. Officials say they have delivered more drugs, better equipment and a generalised improvement in healthcare.
Yet doctors on the ground see no such improvement. Hospitals in Iraq continue to face chronic shortages of medicine, equipment and staff under the failed US-led occupation.
In April 2004, an International Committee for the Red Cross report noted that hospitals in Iraq were overwhelmed with new patients, short of medicine and supplies, and lacking adequate electricity and water.
Ample testimony from medical practitioners confirms this crisis. Dr Thamiz Aziz Abul Rahman is a general practitioner in the prosthetics workshop of Baghdad’s al-Kena Hospital.
“Eleven months ago we submitted an emergency order for prosthetic materials to the ministry of health - and still we have nothing,” he said. “This is worse than even during the sanctions.”
At Fallujah General Hospital, another doctor adds that there has been virtually no assistance for the stricken clinic from foreign contractors. Regarding the US military he commented, “They send only bombs - not medicine.”
Dahr Jamail has compiled a 38-page report on the experience of Iraqi hospitals under occupation for the World Tribunal on Iraq. To download a copy go to www.dahrjamailiraq.com
Iraqi Hospitals Attacked And Damaged By Us Forces
www.dahrjamailiraq.com
26 June 2005
Urgent request for help from the west of Iraq
An urgent humanitarian crisis is unfolding in occupied west Iraq. The Doctors for Iraq Society is calling on you to act NOW.
US occupation soldiers have conducted simultaneous military operations in cities across the west of Iraq. Between May- June 2005, the heaviest of these attacks took place in the cities of Haditha and Al-Qa’im. These cities and surrounding villages are home to an estimated 300,000 people.
Eyewitness and medical personnel in the area have described how US soldiers prevented food and medication reaching Haditha and Al-Qa’im and targeted the cities two main hospitals, medical staff and ambulances.
US soldiers violated the Geneva Convention and international law by preventing civilians from accessing healthcare. Eyewitnesses reported
at least one patient being shot dead in his bed on a hospital ward. Doctors were prevented from assisting patients and civilians in need. A number of doctors and medical personnel were killed in the attack and others were arrested by US forces in the hospital. They were later released, along with the hospital manager who was detained for two days.
The huge military operations in the area have caused widespread damage and an unknown number of civilians were killed and injured during the attack.
Video footage shot by doctors shows a badly damage medical store in the Haditha hospital and damaged surgical theatres. The medical store contained medicine and equipment for all hospitals and medical centers in the west of Iraq. Staff and patients say the damage was carried out by “by violent and barbaric US soldiers.”
The Doctors for Iraq Society and other Iraqi organizations working in the area are asking for urgent assistance from outside Iraq to help equip the hospital with medication and other essential supplies.
Medical staff need basis such as medicines, surgical sets, laundry unit, laboratory equipment and surgical sets.
Staff and patients also need urgent protection from the ongoing brutal actions of US occupation forces who continue to violate international law by carrying out attacks on patients and medical staff in Iraq.
The Doctors for Iraq Society is calling on human rights organizations
to conduct an urgent investigation into what happened in Haditha and Al-Qa’im, and to take testimonies from eyewitnesses and medical staff
in the area.
For more information contact about the attack and the specific of the hospital contact Doctors for Iraq Society at: info@doctorsforiraq.org mailto:info@doctorsforiraq.org
Or Dr. Salam Ismael at: salam.obaidi@gmail.com mailto:salam.obaidi@gmail.com
For media enquiries contact
salam.obaidi@doctorsforiraq.org
Dr. Salam T. Ismael
General secretary
Doctors for Iraq Society
salam_ismael@hotmail.com
UK Phone : 0044 (0) 2085209489
UK Mobile : 0044 (0) 7891022381
Baghdad phone No. : 00964 1 4437512
Baghdad Mobile : 00964 7901 963 257
Mortar attack disrupts Baghdad water supply
aljazeera
Saturday 02 July 2005
A mortar attack sparked a fire that forced authorities to shut down a water plant, leaving millions of weary Baghdad residents with dry taps in 38C (100F) heat, Iraqi officials said.
Just a day earlier, the mayor of the capital had threatened to quit, because of mounting infrastructure problems - including a lack of clean drinking water.
The blaze on Friday at a power station north of Baghdad cut off electricity to a water plant serving northern and western parts of the capital, the o
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