Qatar to start gas supplies to Iraq in winter, an Iraqi official said on Wednesday without specifying the timeline of the start of the imports.

“We reached an agreement with Qatar to provide us with quantities of gas in winter … it could start within months,” Adil Karim, Iraq’s acting electricity minister said during an interview with Iraqia News.

The imports will be delivered to the country through Qatar’s ports.

Iraq and Qatar discussed gas supplies to the former to address its power shortages in February.
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​Sadr's latest initiative is the most farcical of all his failed initiatives.

​The Iraqi political scene is not just a political impasse as analysts and pundits say. It should also be seen as a mediocre comedy, regardless of all its banners, political parties and various protagonists.
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The first comedic actors are the intellectuals and writers, who have relentlessly marketed themselves as liberals and democrats, as they tried to restore the lustre of the political process after the October 10 elections.

They pin the blame on those who boycotted the ballot, which was shunned by more than 82 percent of Iraqis.

​Today, nearly 20,000 people displaced by the conflict need aid in the area, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council.

In Iraq, "maku" means "nothing," and father-of-five Issa al-Zamzoum says "maku" a lot: no electricity, no home, no rebuilding and no job.

Eight years after heavy fighting between Islamic State jihadists and the army, the reconstruction of his war-ravaged village in northern Iraq is at a standstill.

"There is nothing here, no electricity," 42-year-old Zamzoum sighed. "Even work, there is none."

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​Aoun Diab, adviser to Iraq’s Ministry of Water Resources, said last week that the country’s water reserves had fallen by 50 percent compared to last year. Although Iraq’s reserves are sufficient to meet drinking water and some agricultural needs, he said, the country will face “a severe summer.”

More than any other country in the Middle East, Iraq is facing a water crisis. The country relies on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers for 98 percent of its surface water and the water levels of both have dropped significantly. The Ministry of Water Resources has forecast that both rivers will dry up by 2040 without action to change current trends. Iraq’s Sawa Lake dried out this year and Razzaza Lake is shrinking. Efforts to restore Iraq’s famous marshlands after Saddam Hussein destroyed them have been partially successful, but drought and upstream dams threaten them once again.

Many of Iraq’s waterways have reduced water levels, increased salinity and substantial pollution. The southern part of the country faces particularly serious and urgent problems. The lack of flow out of the rivers, combined with the rising sea level, is pushing saltwater from the Arabian Gulf into Iraq’s rivers. The World Bank noted last year that southern Iraq is already exceeding “critical water quality thresholds,” often too contaminated for people to use. Earlier this month, an Iraqi meteorological official said that dust storms are becoming increasingly common.

Multiple factors are driving Iraq’s water crisis. Iraq has experienced several years of drought. It is the fifth-most vulnerable country to climate change, according to the UN. Droughts have increased in duration and severity and temperatures hit 50 degrees Celsius and higher in 2020. Climate change is likely to change the snowpack that feeds the Tigris and Euphrates, affecting water volume and decreasing predictability. The World Bank has forecast that a temperature increase of 1 C would “cause a 20 percent reduction of available freshwater” in Iraq by 2050.
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The world’s sixth-largest oil producer still suffers from fuel shortages and power outages.

​As Iraq marks 19 years since the U.S.-led invasion and the fall of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime this month, the country hasn’t turned into the stable, prosperous democracy that the United States and its allies promised and Iraqis hoped it would. Militias roam the country, corruption is rife, basic services are still lacking, and the country’s politicians have been unable to form a government in the six months that have passed since the last national election.
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But nothing better symbolizes Iraq’s dysfunction than the absurd fact that the world’s sixth-largest oil producer still suffers from fuel shortages and power outages as it struggles to supply its own population with fuel and electricity.

On average, a household in Baghdad gets six hours of electricity a day from the national grid. Those who can afford it pay for private generator providers to cover the shortfall. For the millions of people who cannot afford the exuberant prices, power can be out for hours on end daily. In addition to daily suffering without power, much of Iraq’s economic activity is affected. Businesses cannot flourish when electricity sources are unreliable.

While Iraqi politicians are quick to point to the fact that energy demand in the country more than quadrupled in the past two decades, the reality is that Iraq would be capable of producing enough electricity to meet that demand if sufficient planning were put in place and corruption weeded out. Experts point to losses in transmission and Iraq’s electricity distribution being among the worst in the world—a matter that could be solved with investment and effective governance in the sector.

Iraq’s problems stem from the weaknesses at the institutional level which eventually lead to many people being involved in economic decision making in the country, Iraq’s finance minister said on Tuesday, adding that massive trade deficit with neighboring Iran is among several arrangements that cannot continue.

“The problem of the country is really institutional,” Iraq’s Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Ali al-Allawi said in a discussion at the Atlantic Council on Tuesday, adding that the “institutional setup is extremely weak, the state itself, public administration is weak, we have several weak points in it that in some areas there are departments of government that report to different sources of authority.”

According to Allawi, the institutional weakness has eventually led to “many people getting involved in economic decision making.”

Iraq is ranked as one of the world’s top ten most corrupt countries, according to a report by Transparency International published in January.  
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​A former speaker of Iraq’s parliament has warned of a plan to grant Iraqi citizenship to hundreds of thousands of Jews in a bid to serve the interests of the Israeli regime.

In a televised interview on Sunday, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani stated that a multi-stage project has been devised to divide and rule the Arab country.

“The project consists of stages, the first of which is to end the united Shia political forces, and then announce an international deal to grant Iraqi citizenship to 500,000 Jews and welcome them in Baghdad for investment,” he said.

Al-Mashhadani, the eldest member of the Iraqi parliament, explained that the next stage is to control the political forces through the Jewish lobby to appoint new political leaders and then settle the Palestinians in the western Anbar province.
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Water levels in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region have decreased significantly as Iran has cut down large portions of water flowing into the country from the east.

The Alwan dam in Diyala province’s Khanaqin holds 38 million cubic meters of water, but Iran has for the past ten days reduced the flow of water into the dam.

 “Iran took over the water of Alwan. They use it for their own purposes and you can see that the amount of water is decreasing day by day,” Ahmad Wasin, director of the Alwan dam, told Rudaw’s Hunar Hamid on Saturday.

The decrease in the dam’s water levels has led authorities to reduce the usage of the dam’s water.
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Man applied to Australian government for act of grace payment over Mosul strike targeting Islamic State in 2017

​An Iraqi man who alleges 35 family members were killed when an Australian airstrike targeting Islamic State instead obliterated a house where civilians were sheltering has been denied a compensation payment by the federal government.

The man, who did not wish to be identified, applied for what is known as an act of grace payment from the Department of Finance last year, arguing that there was strong evidence the Australian Defence Force dropped the bomb in 2017 as part of a series of airstrikes in Mosul by the coalition fighting IS.

But in December he was informed the payment would not be made, despite the delegate who made the decision not having access to an ADF report on whether one of its F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets was responsible for the airstrike.
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It is understood the man, who is still based in Iraq, requested a payment in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars.
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