Iran actively obstructs feeders of Mesopotamia's most important rivers, sources of more than 90% of its fresh water

​Years of aggression by Iran toward its western neighbor Iraq have culminated in the outright theft of the country’s natural resources.

For the last several weeks, reports in international media have drawn attention to Iran’s systematic rerouting of Iraq’s vital waterways.

Despite persistent demands from Iraqi officials, Iran has been actively obstructing feeders of the most important rivers in Mesopotamia, the Tigris and the Euphrates, from which Iraq gets more than 90% of its fresh water.

Western-style democracy has failed Iraq, bringing a dystopian economy, an ineffectual government and more pain for its long-suffering people

​Iraq in 2021 is still a state afflicted by poverty, injustice, the trauma of great loss of life, and daily fear. Iraqis still suffer from a sense of powerlessness, defeat and humiliation. Since the start of the year, 330 civilians have been killed, including 27 children. Iraq Body Count has now documented more than 208,800 violent civilian deaths since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, most of them occurring after the country became a democracy in 2005.

​Democratically elected governments in Iraq, supported by the US-UK coalition that invaded and occupied Iraq in March 2003, as part of the ‘War on Terror’, have so far killed more than 4,000 Iraqi civilians through bombing and shelling aimed to destroy the insurgency and in the last years the Iraqi police force and militias it supports have killed hundreds of protesters across Iraq. The Iraqi governments also allowed the killing of thousands more in airstrikes by Coalition and Turkish forces or Iranian-supported militias such as the Popular Mobilisation Forces.
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Iraq held its first parliamentary elections in December 2005, while the country was still under US and British occupation. It was meant to hold its fifth elections a month ago, in June, but they have been delayed until mid-October, because the country's Independent High Electoral Commission asked for more time to organise "free and fair elections". Yet, from their very start, Iraq’s elections have been marred by violence, fraud and protests.

Fears of violent demonstrations across Iraq’s southern cities rise as cuts deprive thousands of power to run hospitals, businesses and homes.

As summer temperatures reached scorching levels, hundreds of Iraqis poured into the streets to protest widespread power outages in Baghdad and the country’s southern provinces.

In the oil-rich city of Basra, demonstrators blocked highways and burned tyres last week to pressure the local government into addressing chronic electricity cuts and poor public services.

​Temperatures in Basra have been soaring above 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) at noon. Iraqi authorities responded by shortening working hours to less than five, citing extreme heat.

Electricity outages have routinely led to violent protests, particularly in southern Iraq, as successive governments failed to address the recurrent issue in recent years.

Although Iraq is an oil-rich country, it has been unable to solve the electricity problem, which has been chronicled first by an embargo and then by corruption, mismanagement, and instability for nearly 30 years.

The electricity crisis has shown the situation faced by Iraq in providing services in all its dimensions.

The electricity sector was subjected to massive neglect, inadequate maintenance, and looting before 2003, while after the US invasion it was neglected due to years of corruption, despite great promises.
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Power outages during the high temperatures of the summer have even become a factor that will lead prime ministers to resign and change the political balance.

Thousands of civilians injured and some killed are still waiting for the United States to pay them as they were wrongfully targeted in the decades-long wait that ended in their defeat.

It was March 17, 2017. Troops from the US-led coalition fighting jihadists in Iraq were advancing on Mosul's Old City, squeezing out the Islamic State (IS) group.
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But just months before the recapture of the city, where IS had declared its caliphate in 2014, a new human toll was added to the growing tragedy when it was revealed more than 100 civilians had been killed in a single coalition air strike.

The compensation system is opaque even for those with expertise, said Sarah Holewinski, Washington director for Human Rights Watch. "They have sometimes paid, sometimes not. We need degrees to figure out laws and channels," she told AFP.

The real tragedy of the 2003 U.S. invasion is that virtually none of its lessons have been learned. It's easy to understand why. None of its perpetrators have ever suffered any consequences for the damage they inflicted on the country and the world.

​Donald Rumsfeld’s death is a good occasion to reflect on the Iraq War of which he was a major architect. The War was the highpoint of the U.S. pursuit of global hegemony. That means it’s been downhill since then. Its failures echo far beyond the calamity of the War itself.   The collateral impacts—before, during, and after—have grievously damaged American interests and substantially diminished its power in the world. It’s the exact opposite of what was promised going in.

The War grew out of one fiscal problem and two strategic opportunities.  The problem was that after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the U.S. didn’t have any meaningful military challengers. None. So, there was no rationale for the kind of military budgets the weapons makers had been accustomed to.  People were demanding a “peace dividend.”  It would never come.

Over the course of the Cold War, Defense Department budgets averaged $458 billion a year.  But in the Clinton years, funding dropped to an average of $394 billion a year.  If the weapons makers, one of the most powerful lobbies in the country, were to continue with the kind of gilded glutting they had enjoyed during the Cold War, they needed a major new kinetic event—a big war—that would require hundreds of billions—eventually trillions—of dollars of spending.  They got it.

​At June’s G7 meeting, U.S. President, Joe Biden, received the backing of the world’s seven largest advanced economies (comprised of the U.S., the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Canada, and Japan) to set up an alternative to China’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ (OBOR) initiative as part of a broad push back against Beijing’s increasing influence around the globe.

Although much of the official comments surrounding the announcement consisted of vague and fluffy statements about human rights, Joe Biden’s previous comments about China are much more informative as to what the real thrust of this U.S.-led alternative to the OBOR is.

Most appositely, in correctly grouping China together with Russia in the context of both the Middle East and Asia, Biden stated during the presidential election campaign that he regarded China as a “serious competitor” to the U.S. and Russia as an “opponent”.

​What this means for those countries in the Middle East who side with Washington in the ongoing power struggle with China for dominance across the region, is that even more money is on the table from both Washington and Beijing and there is no country better at playing the two sides off against one another than Iraq. This is the reason why within a very short space of time Baghdad announced that it was allowing huge infrastructure investment from China into Iraq but also cancelling the enormously controversial multi-billion oil deal that it struck with China’s Zhenhua Oil on 2 January this year. 

A political and social crisis in Iraq has escalated in recent days, as soaring temperatures, widespread protests and rolling blackouts take hold of the oil-rich south of the country.

Iran, which normally supplies around a third of Iraq’s gas and electricity, has drastically curtailed the amount of energy it is providing to the country, in what some believe is an attempt to force the country to pay millions in unpaid bills.

Iraq’s Minister of Electricity Majed Mahdi Hantoosh submitted his resignation this week, following calls for him to step back by opposition figures including powerful Shia cleric and militia leader Muqtada Al-Sadr.
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An official at Iraq’s electricity ministry told The Independent there were now as many as 18 hours of power cuts a day on average, impacting the operation of homes, hospitals and businesses.

The US military said it targeted operational and weapons storage facilities at two locations in Syria and one location in Iraq.

​​Iraq’s Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhemi has condemned the overnight US air attack on Iran-backed armed groups in Iraq and Syria which a monitor said killed at least seven fighters.
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In a statement on Sunday, the US military said it targeted operational and weapons storage facilities at two locations in Syria and one location in Iraq in response to drone attacks against the US personnel and facilities in Iraq.

The attacks came at the direction of US President Joe Biden, the second time he has ordered retaliatory attacks against Iran-backed militia since taking office five months ago.

“We condemn the US air attack that targeted a site last night on the Iraqi-Syrian border, which represents a blatant and unacceptable violation of Iraqi sovereignty and Iraqi national security,” said a statement from the Iraqi PM’s office.

March in Diyala province marks the seventh anniversary of the paramilitary force’s founding.

​​Thousands of members of Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) have marched in a parade showcasing tanks and rocket launchers, in the biggest demonstration of military might since the founding of the umbrella organisation of mostly Muslim Shia paramilitary groups.
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The event on Saturday at a military base in Diyala province, in eastern Iraq, marked the seventh anniversary of the formation of the PMF, established after a 2014 call to arms by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani to help defeat the ISIL (ISIS) armed group.

​At the time, ISIL held a third of Iraq’s territory and the PMF, or Hashd al-Shaabi, was critical in helping the US-backed Iraqi army defeat it in 2017.
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The parade, held in Camp Ashraf, saw Russian-made tanks, boats and locally made rocket launchers come down a broad thoroughfare. Iranian-made weaponry, including drones, were also displayed during the event that was broadcast on Iraqi state TV and was attended by Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, officially the country’s commander-in-chief.