BAGHDAD-

Iraq’s central bank said on Wednesday it planned for the first time to allow trade from China to be settled directly in yuan, in a move aimed, according to analysts, at reducing dependence on the US dollar and thus avoiding some of its political and economic effects on the country.

The decision came after the return of an Iraqi delegation from a visit over the last few days to Washington.

Iraqi officials sought to reach an understanding with American officials on the easing of the restrictions imposed by the US Federal Reserve on financial transfers involving US dollars to Iraqi banks.

The US has been seen as working to curtail the smuggling of US dollars to Iran and other countries facing US sanctions, such as Syria.

The US restrictions had sparked widespread anger in Iraq, especially among pro-Iranian factions, which described them as an American attempt to blackmail Iraq and called on the government of Muhammad Shiaa al-Sudani to look for alternatives to US dollar domination.

The central bank has been taking urgent steps to compensate for a dollar shortage in local markets, which prompted the cabinet to approve a currency revaluation earlier this month.

“It is the first time imports would be financed from China in yuan, as Iraqi imports from China have been financed in (US) dollars only,” the government’s economic adviser, Mudhir Salih, said on Wednesday.

The Iraqi central bank could, as part of its plan, boost the balances of Iraqi banks that have accounts with Chinese banks in yuan, it said in a statement.
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Another option would be to boost local banks’ balances via the central bank’s accounts with JP Morgan and Development Bank of Singapore (DBS), it added.

The first option would depend on the central bank’s yuan reserves, while the other would use the bank’s US dollar reserves at JP Morgan and DBS. The two banks would convert the dollars to yuan and pay the final beneficiary in China, Salih explained.

The Iraqi move is the latest sign of the yuan’s growing role on the international stage as China gradually opens up its financial markets and some countries look to diversify their currency exposures.

These include Arab Gulf countries, such as Saudi Arabia, which has decided to adopt the Chinese yuan instead of the dollar in its sale of oil to China.

Israel also announced its intention to use the Chinese yuan alongside the Canadian and Australian dollars as a direct substitute for the US dollar.

Economists believe that the global economy is moving towards diversifying the official currencies to mitigate the worldwide economic side effects caused by the strengthening dollar.

Experts say Iraq is not isolated from this global trend. Moreover, Baghdad is concerned that total dependence on the US dollar would deepen its vulnerability to American pressures, as was the case recently.

The experts add however that Iraq's use of the yuan with China does not mean that it is about to abandon or replace the dollar. It simply does not have the luxury of doing so, not least since all its dealings are in dollars, in addition to the fact that all Iraqi foreign currency reserves are with the US Federal Reserve.

The option of dealing in the Chinese yuan was the subject of months-long discussions in Iraq, especially after the Arab-Chinese summit hosted last December by Saudi Arabia, which was attended by a high-ranking Iraqi delegation led by the prime minister.

Iraq has maintained close relations with China for decades and the scope of cooperation between the two sides has expanded significantly in recent years. In 2019 Baghdad signed up to become one of Beijing's partners in the "Belt and Road" initiative.
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Baghdad (IraqiNews.com) – The British Cabinet recently released documents revealing information about the US-British lies the two countries told before the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The documents revealed that London was confident that the allegations of Iraq’s possession of any weapons of mass destruction or long-range missiles, at least two years before its invasion, were false.

The BBC considered that these documents are the first of their kind that prove that the British Prime Minister, at the time, Tony Blair, knew that Iraq had no capabilities to possess prohibited weapons in accordance with United Nations resolutions issued before and after the withdrawal of the Iraqi army from Kuwait in February 1991, following Operation Desert Storm.

20 years after the beginning of the war, the documents confirm that the strict international sanctions imposed on Iraq after the liberation of Kuwait from the occupation of the Iraqi army in 1991, prevented Saddam Hussein from developing weapons that were not permitted.

The documents refer mainly to the effectiveness of British sanctions within a review conducted by the Blair administration in 2001 of the US-British policy on Iraq, and this review was agreed upon during the first visit of Blair to Washington after George Bush was elected as U.S. President.

The documents confirm that Britain offered the U.S. administration a new policy called ‘a contract with the Iraqi people’ aiming to obtain support, especially from the countries and people of the Arab region, for the US-British policy in dealing with Iraq.
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“Without our containment policy, it was likely that Iraq would now possess a long-range missile capable of reaching Britain and Europe, as well as chemical, biological and nuclear warheads for such a weapon,” the review clearly confirmed, according to the documents.

Iraq could be the epicenter of a global superbug outbreak, a new study warns.

Scientists at American University in Beirut, Lebanon, say decades of war in the country — including the US invasion in the 2000s — had led to a 'catastrophic rise' in antibiotic resistance.
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Destroyed healthcare infrastructure, medicine shortages, heavy metal contamination and poor sanitation were all likely to blame, they argued.

Scientists and doctors are concerned about a bacteria emerging that cannot be treated using currently available antibiotics. Estimates suggest it could cause 10million deaths a year by 2050 if no action is taken.

Last month the discovery of supergonorrhea in Massachusetts — which showed signs of resistance to antibiotics — prompted health authorities to warn the bacteria poses a 'serious public health concern'.

Previously, antibiotic resistance has largely been attributed to the overuse of antibiotics.

But attention is now turning to other factors, such as heavy metals and disinfectants that are used in conflict, healthcare and the hospitality sector. 

War has been implicated as a factor in the emergence of antibiotic resistance since the 1940s, but the authors say it has received little attention.

The scientists said they chose to focus on Iraq because the country had been beset by conflicts for the past four decades.

This included the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the First Gulf War in 1991, and the US-led invasion and occupation launched in the 2000s. The country also faced an Islamic State insurgency in the 2010s.

The study authors, whose paper was published in the journal BMJ Global Health, reviewed other studies in the paper to warn that the conflicts had led to an environment perfect for the spread of ‘microbial pathogens’ in the country, which cause disease.

Metals used in weaponry and explosives such as lead, mercury, chromium and copper, are all present in war environments.

Some bacteria species taken from these areas are already shown to have evolved resistance to combat these heavy metals' toxicity.
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Study author Dr Antoine Abou Fayad said: 'Contemporary conflicts waged in urban and industrialized landscapes pressure microbes with selective environments that contain unique combinations and concentrations of toxic heavy metals and antibiotics, while simultaneously providing niches and dissemination routes for microbial pathogens.

'These can include the high number of wounded, the nature of wounds, refugee displacement, the collapse of sanitation controls, loss of diagnostics and skilled healthcare personnel, the dismantlement of healthcare infrastructures and the placement of often under-resourced and improvised field hospitals where both injured combatants and civilians are exposed to harmful pathogens with limited care and resources to properly recover.'

Though war environments have been linked with the emergence of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) since the 1940s, the research team say the risk posed by Iraq has so far received little attention.
They say it needs to be studied further in order to prevent millions of unnecessary deaths.

Dr Fayad added: 'Taken together, a destroyed healthcare infrastructure, inappropriate microbial therapies, limited resources, high heavy metal contamination in humans and the environment, and a lack of [clean water, sanitation and hygiene], combined, likely play instrumental roles in the catastrophic rise of AMR in Iraq and, by extension, regionally and globally.
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'Understanding these linkages between AMR and conflict, especially across time, is essential for a global response to AMR, especially as there is little indication that conflict, worldwide, will abate in years to come.'

The poverty rate in Iraq was 25%, or about 11 million people, in 2022, according to the country’s Ministry of Planning.

The state-run Iraqi News Agency quoted a ministry spokesman as saying that the reasons for the high poverty rate include repercussions of the coronavirus pandemic and the economic crisis that resulted from the drop in oil prices.

The ministry spokesman said that the government has supported those affected by the level of poverty in Iraq by raising some salaries and by improving the system for ration cards. The spokesman noted that Iraq faces significant challenges, including problems in the political and security sectors, economic instability, social unrest caused by high unemployment, eroded public services, and persistent low standards of living.

This is part of a special series where NPR looks back at our coverage of major news stories in the past. Listen to the full audio story to hear excerpts from Colin Powell's U.N. speech and more of NPR's archival audio.
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There wasn't just one moment that led to the Iraq War. But one speech, delivered 20 years ago at the United Nations, would come to define and undermine the conflict.

On Feb. 5, 2003, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell sat in front of members of the U.N. Security Council. He'd been a staunch critic of U.S. intervention against Iraq's authoritarian leader, Saddam Hussein.

But with the world watching, Powell made a case for war.

"My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources — solid sources," he said. "These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."

Powell used information that intelligence officials assured him was credible. There were reconnaissance photos, elaborate maps and charts, and even taped phone conversations between senior members of Iraq's military.

"Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons," Powell said. "Saddam Hussein has used such weapons. And Saddam Hussein has no compunction about using them again — against his neighbors, and against his own people."

Powell repeatedly used one phrase during his hour-long speech: "weapons of mass destruction." He said those words a total of 17 times. It was the phrase the Bush administration kept publicly using to help justify invading Iraq.

A month and a half after the U.N. speech, President Bush ordered air strikes over Baghdad. It marked the beginning of a military operation "to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger," Bush said in a televised address to the nation.

U.S. forces toppled Hussein's regime in a matter of weeks, and the search intensified for evidence of Iraq's so-called "weapons of mass destruction." But the weapons were nowhere to be found.
Americans started asking questions.

"It's kind of embarrassing they haven't found anything," said Allen Hunley, a Tennessee dentist who spoke to NPR in July 2003 while attending the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. "It's almost like they were salesmen and they had a thing to sell."

National security analyst Joseph Cirincione also criticized Powell's speech in comments to NPR. Particularly, Powell's assurances that there was solid evidence behind his claims of sophisticated and illicit Iraqi weapons programs.
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"Now we know that that just wasn't true," said Cirincione, then the director for non-proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

California Rep. Jane Harman served as the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and voted in support of the 2002 measure OK'ing the use of military force against Iraq. Reports of a "very long and scary list of active weapons of mass destruction" influenced that decision, Harman told NPR.
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"I believed what I was told," Harman said on All Things Considered in January 2004. "And I'm as surprised as you that it turns out that there are no stockpiles of weapons."
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There were also claims Bush took advantage of Powell's reputation by dispatching him to the U.N.

"As Bush said to him at the time, 'Maybe they'll believe you. Maybe the audience will believe you,' " journalist and Powell biographer Karen DeYoung told NPR in 2006. "Because it was always clear in the Bush administration that Powell was more popular than anyone else."

To this day, the Iraq War is widely viewed as a foreign policy and humanitarian disaster. The conflict dragged on for almost nine years and claimed nearly 4,500 American lives. Over 185,000 Iraqi civilians were killed, according to Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Some 2 million Iraqis had been displaced from their homes by the time U.S. forces pulled out in 2011.

Three years later, President Obama ordered troops back to Iraq to help combat the militant group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS — assuring Americans he would not commit to "another ground war." U.S. forces officially withdrew in December 2021 after almost seven years of fighting.
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Powell later called his U.N. speech a "great intelligence failure" and a "blot" on his record, telling NBC News' Meet the Press in 2004 he trusted the information he'd gotten.

"But it turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and in some cases deliberately misleading," Powell said. "And for that, I am disappointed. And I regret it."

DW's Jaafar Abdul Karim, a popular TV host in the Arabic-speaking world, and his production team canceled plans to film in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad after facing threats.

Abdul Karim and other staff members of Deutsche Welle, Germany's international broadcaster, had to leave Iraq on short notice on Thursday morning due to security concerns.

The team traveled to the Iraqi capital to film a new episode of "JaafarTalk." The production was meant to take place in cooperation with the Iraqi broadcaster Al-Rasheed. DW has criticized the incident as an "unacceptable" attack on press freedom.
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"JaafarTalk" is one of the most viewed TV formats in the Arabic-speaking world. The weekly DW talk show deals with topics that are considered taboo in the region, including violations against human rights or lacking gender equality for women.

On the social media platform TikTok, "JaafarTalk" is the most successful channel produced by a German media company, with over 1.4 million followers, according to rankings published by media trade magazine The Fix.


'JaafarTalk' host threatened with arrest

In its latest episode, the show planned to deal with unemployment rates among youths, as well as political participation and women's rights. The production was planned to take place in Baghdad's Zawraa-Park.

Representatives from Iraq's protest movement and government representatives were due to take part in the show. Some 50 audience members were also invited.

But Abdul Karim said he and his team were put under increasing pressure by high-ranking Iraqi officials.

An Iraqi media outlet circulated a video in which it accused the DW host of wanting to spread "abnormal and perverse" sexual behaviors in Baghdad. The video included clips from earlier "JaafarTalk" episodes that dealt with homosexuality. The media outlet called on Iraqi authorities to stop the filming of the new episode.

Iraq's Commission for Communications and Media suddenly demanded that DW acquire a special filming permit, despite DW's partners already having applied for the normally required permits in advance, which had already been granted.

Representatives from the Iraqi Interior Ministry then came to a hotel on Wednesday evening where Abdul Karim and his team were staying.
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According to DW, the Interior Ministry representatives informed Abdul Karim that he was not allowed to continue his work without a special permit. If he did not comply, he would face arrest. The Iraqi government could no longer guarantee his safety, the representatives said.

​DW lodges complaint with Iraqi embassy

"This was an arbitrary action against us," Abdul Karim said. "A day before the show was to be filmed, new demands and restrictions were issued by the hour."

Manuela Kasper-Claridge, DW's editor-in-chief, criticized the actions of Iraqi officials.

"It is alarming how journalists are being treated in Iraq. The threats made against our team and presenter Jaafar Abdul Karim by forces in Iraq that seek to put an end to freedom of expression are entirely unacceptable," she said.

"The JaafarTalk program reaches millions of people, because DW provides a platform for important debates in the region. Even though we were forced to cancel the show, we will continue our reporting on developments in Iraq," Kasper-Claridge added.

DW has lodged a protest with the Iraqi Embassy in Berlin against the treatment of the broadcaster's employees and for hindering journalistic work.

"This large-scale coercion by the Republic of Iraq is an unprecedented restriction of press freedom," the German international broadcaster said in a statement.

Freedom of expression is severely restricted in general in Iraq. According to the Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders, Iraq is currently ranked at 172 out of 180 countries in the index.

According to figures gathered by Reporters Without Borders, nearly 300 journalists have been killed in Iraq over the past 20 years.

In Iraq, Shiite militias have a particularly great influence on the government. The armed groups are closely linked to the regime in neighboring Iran. While they are officially subordinate to the Iraqi prime minister, they tend to operate independently of the government.

Small gangs of buffaloes sat submerged in green and muddy waters. Their back ridges rose over the surface like a chain of black islets, spanning the Toos River, a tributary of the Tigris that flows into the Huwaiza marshes in southern Iraq.
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With their melancholic eyes, they gazed with defiance at an approaching boat, refusing to budge. Only when the boatman shrieked “heyy, heyy, heyy” did one or two reluctantly raise their haunches. Towering over the boat, they moved a few steps away, giving the boatmen barely enough space to steer between a cluster of large, curved horns.
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On the right bank of the river stood a cultural centre built in the traditional style of southern Iraq, with tall arches made of thick bundles of reed tied together. It catered to a large number of Iraqi tourists and a handful of foreigners who have flocked to visit the marshland region since it was named a Unesco world heritage site in 2016.

A couple of hundred metres past the cultural centre, however, the engine of the boat sputtered, and its bottom scrapped against the mud as the river dwindled into a shallow swamp, where small herons and grebes stood in water barely reaching halfway up their stick-like legs.

The foliage on the two banks also disappeared, revealing a devastating scene: what two years earlier was a great expanse of blue water, a lagoon teeming with wildlife, fish, and home to large herds of water buffaloes, had turned into a flat desert where a few thorny shrubs sprouted.

Under the scorching sun, the hot wind kicked tumbleweed across parched yellow earth, scarred with deep cracks and crumbling into thin dust under the feet. Rising above the ground were mounds of dead reed beds upon which the marsh dwellers had built their homes. A few relics of their former life lay scattered around: broken plastic buckets, some rusting metal pipe, and a kettle.
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​The ruin of nearly 3,000 sq km (1,000 sq miles) of this unique ecosystem is a small example of the unprecedented environmental disaster unfolding in Iraq. Rivers and lakes that had spawned farming communities since the dawn of civilisation are drying up, the country’s water reserves reduced by half, while the Iraqi ministry of water resources estimates that one-quarter of Iraq’s fresh water will be lost in the next decade.

In the province of Mosul and surrounding areas, considered Iraq’s bread basket, two consecutive drought seasons have turned large swaths of wheat and barley fields into arid lands, leading to the loss of nearly 90% of the most recent harvest. Officials believe that will continue to the next season.

After canals and rivers went dry, farmers began digging boreholes, but the unregulated use of underground water is causing a severe drop in the quality and water levels. In the southern region of Samawa, the illegal digging of boreholes has led to the total disappearance of Lake Sawa.

Meanwhile, freak sandstorms battering cities and eroding the soil have become a recurrent event owing to the drought and loss of vegetation coverage – 40,000 hectares (100,000 acres) are lost to desertification each year.

The drought is leading to the displacement of tens of thousands of people, pushing farmers to abandon their lands and move into the margins of big cities, settling in shanties on their outskirts, straining an already crumbling infrastructure and causing further destruction of agricultural lands and desertification. And in a country with a fragile security situation, rife with heavily armed militias and awash with an abundance of weapons, the competition over water, and the unregulated digging of boreholes, is creating local feuds that threaten to spill into larger conflicts.

The causes for these environmental disasters are multiple and interlinked: rising temperatures, record low rainfalls due to the climate crisis; the drastic reduction of the amount of water reaching Iraq from upstream countries, with Turkey’s extensive dam networks on the Tigris and Euphrates cutting Iraq’s share by 60%, while nearby Iran has diverted tributaries and other rivers. The temperature rise is also causing an increase in water evaporation, contributing to the depletion of reservoirs.

​Throughout these decades, government officials – from the British colonial officer to Saddam’s Republican Guard – saw in the dense marshes and dizzying maze of canals a place of refuge for those opposing central authority, from the African slaves who revolted in the ninth century, to communists and Islamist rebels in modern times, along with droves of military deserters who fled conscription.

That view of the marshes as a dangerous place and home to brigands contributed to the way the city people and countryside farmers looked at and despised the marsh Arabs.

“The impact of climate change is working as a threat magnifier,” said Dr Hassan al Janabi, a former minister for water resources and an environmental expert. “But in essence, this is a man-made disaster, in which the marshes are the clear victims, due to misunderstanding of the unique climate and cultural importance of the region.”

He added: “Its destruction is part of the traditional prejudice of the city towards the countryside, and especially against the marsh people who have always been the victims of discrimination and at the receiving end of insults because they raise buffaloes.

“There are hundreds of illegal rivers diverting water towards the lands of influential people who use them for fish farms or irrigating their lands. We have lost 80% of the buffaloes because of mismanagement.”

Just north of the Toos, which is supposed to feed water into the Huwaiza marsh, a local activist pointed out two large fish ponds and an illegally dug canal that siphons water into nearby agricultural lands, all belonging to a powerful local tribal sheikh. In the past month, even the trickle of water in the Toos had dried.

A ministry in Baghdad determines the allocation of water for irrigation to each province, with agriculture consuming the largest share of water – nearly 65%. The severe drought has led to an increase in competition, in which the interests of weaker communities, such as the marsh dwellers, are sacrificed in the interests of more powerful ones.

“This is a crime that is taking place right in front of our eyes,” said Janabi. “The marshes are the true historical lineage of Mesopotamia but these groups which have lived here for thousands of years see their way of life being eradicated for the benefit of rice cultivators, which in reality has zero economical impact as we import 95% of our rice.”

‘Revival has gone’
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In the Chibayish, the central marshes in the basin of the Euphrates, the scenes of drought and devastation are repeated. What was once an extensive marshes network has shrunk today to a few isolated ponds of stagnating brackish water, stinking of dead fish and highly polluted, sitting amid large swatches of desert landscape. The long, elegant mashoof boats that once plied these waters now lie on their sides, crusted with salt and dried mud.

On the edge of one of these ponds, Abdul Sattar and his two sons took shelter from the oppressive heat in a small mud room, bare except for two reed mats on the dirt floor. An old air cooler clanked noisily outside the small window, churning in hot air.

The eldest son, a slender young man in his 20s, served tea while Abdul pondered in silence for some time when asked about the impact of drought. When he spoke, the words tumbled fast in a heavy guttural accent. He said that in the past few months dozen of his buffaloes had died, and those that remained were too skinny to be sold. “If I butcher them and sell them as meat, they will fetch more,” he added, pulling at the tattered brim of his stained and muddy dishdasha.

In his 40s, with a gaunt face and bronze-coloured skin, withered and beaten by the harsh Iraqi sun, feet caked in mud and cracked, he looked at anyone coming from the city with suspicion. He said the buffaloes were unable to feed themselves because of the drought and were dependent on whatever fodder he could provide.

“They used to go out and graze for a week or two on the green reeds and other vegetation and only come back when they needed to be milked,” he said. “Now I have to feed them, each needs half a tonne of fodder a week, but I can barely afford half of that. Mothers don’t even produce enough milk to feed their calves.”

He looked at his youngest son across the room, a 12-year-old asleep under a blanket in a feeble attempt to hide from the buzzing flies, and said his family were going hungry so he could feed the buffaloes to keep them alive, barely.

The buffaloes refuse to drink the highly polluted water even when they find small mud pools to wallow in. He pointed towards the jug of brackish yellow water that sat in front of him and said he had to drive to the nearby town to buy the drinking water he shared between his family and his buffaloes.

Once before, the marshes where his clan raised their buffaloes had dried; that was in 1994, after Saddam’s campaign to dry the marshes. He was a young man then and accompanied his family as they moved north, finding shelter on the banks of the Tigris south of Baghdad, and he came back after the toppling of the regime, when reviving the marshes became a political priority. “Reviving the marshes was the only thing we got after the [regime] change, and even that is gone now.”

Outside the mud room, three emaciated-looking buffaloes sat in a small muddy pond. A larger herd stood nearby in the shade of a metal canopy. Abdul said generation after generation his tribe had lived with these buffaloes, so dear to them that they had given them individual names.

“These animals, they mean a lot for us, they are like family. We pain when we see them wither and die in front of our eyes,” he said. “I swear if I knew how to do anything else I would, but me and my father, and his father before him, knew nothing but how to raise buffaloes.”

Selling up and moving out

Agriculture, which generates 3% of Iraq’s GDP, employs nearly one-fifth of its workforce, tethering people to their lands and contributing to maintaining the vegetation coverage needed to lessen the impact of sandstorms, soil erosion and global heating.

However, the drought and subsequent crop failures are pushing thousands of families to abandon their lands – 20,000 since 2021, according to International Organization for Migration estimates – heading instead towards the big cities.

In a small neighbourhood tucked under an overpass north of the city of Basra, Karar lives with his family in a small hut built with concrete blocks. Like his neighbours’, his roof is made of corrugated metal and plastic sheets, pinned down with large rocks and blocks. A deep and wide ditch carries the neighbourhood sewage, where trash and plastic bottles float on a grimy metallic green liquid.

As is the case for many of the farmers of Amara and Nassiriya – who at the best of times constituted the poorest people in Iraq – the drought has turned his hardship into destitution.

He said that a few years ago, he came to realise that farming was dying in his village north of the Huwaiza marsh. Water levels were falling, and he had to use a diesel pump to irrigate his fields. “The money we got, we paid on gas for the water pumps. We were going hungry,” he said.

So he sold the few animals he had – sheep and a few buffaloes – and moved to this neighbourhood, trying to scavenge a living from the margins of Basra’s booming oil-fuelled economy, working as a day labourer.

He said he was fortunate to sell his cattle and move out before the worst of the drought hit the area. “Now, my brothers call me and say we wish we left the land and came with you then because now no one wants to buy our buffaloes because they are too skinny.”

Dead palms and buffaloes
In Seeba, in Iraq’s most southern tip, the environmental disaster takes a different shape. Lying on the western banks of Shatt al-Arab, the waterway formed by the meeting of the Euphrates and Tigris, its fertile orchards and fields had been home to dense palm tree plantations for centuries. Water from Shatt al-Arab flows naturally through its canals, regulated by the high and low tide of the nearby Gulf.

During the war with Iran, Seeba became a frontline and battleground. Trenches were dug, fields of barbed wires were stretched, artillery bombardments and tanks destroyed the palm plantations, and thousands of young Iraqi and Iranian soldiers died there. However, after the end of the war, people came back and started reviving their land and eventually restored many of its palm groves.

“If you came here in the 90s, you wouldn’t be able to see Abadan,” said Ridha, a young farmer from the region, as he pointed at the gleaming towers of the Abadan refinery across the waterway.

But things began to change after 2004 when reduced levels of water flowing from the Tigris and Euphrates enabled seawater from the Gulf to intrude deeper and deeper into the Shatt al-Arab, eventually reaching Basra itself for the first time in 2018, which led to mass unrest.

“Since 2009, Seeba has been a disaster zone, and most of our farmlands have disappeared because of the catastrophic rise in water salinity,” an official in the town said.

The exact causes of the drought in the north were reflected here, the official said. From the impact of global heating to Turkey’s reduction of the water volume flowing through the Tigris and Euphrates, Iran’s diversion of tributary rivers such as the Karun, and the discharge of raw sewage and oil industry chemicals into Shatt al-Arab. “Even the upstream provinces are taking Basra’s share of fresh water because of the expansion of their population.”

The high salinity in the water flowing naturally through the irrigation canals is now causing the palm trees to die. “All the water pumps on the riverbanks were cancelled, and farmers are blocking their own canals,” said the official. “Now we get some water pumped from upstream through pipes, or we buy it in trucks. In 2012 the state allocated compensations for the farmers that they have yet to receive 10 years later.”

A proposed mega-desalination project for seawater from the Gulf had been stalled for years, with politicians in Baghdad and Basra accusing each other of receiving kickbacks and commissions. “From a million palm trees in the 1970s, now we have less than 10,000. Farming here is living now by the drip.”

Ridha, tall, lean, moustachioed and wearing a black dishdasha with a red checked kufiya wrapped around his head, pointed at the palm trees in his orchard, each named after the variety of its dates: “Khistawi, barhi, braim …” But most of these precious palm trees died due to the polluted water, losing their tops and long branches, with the top of the trunks bent like a wilting stump.

He motioned towards a canal zigzagging between the dead trees. “The water is killing our palms,” he said. “Back in the 1990s we swam in these rivers, used the water for drinking and cooking, but now farmers are blocking their irrigation canals to prevent the poisonous water from entering their fields. Those who still want to farm have to buy trucks of water, but most are just abandoning the lands and getting a government job with the police or the Hashed [Shia paramilitary units].”

Ridha pointed at another scourge in the area’s environmental disaster, a large herd of buffaloes. As the drought destroyed the marsh habitat to the north, the Ma’dan owners moved their herds here, settling them among the fields and in the now dormant irrigation canals. They have become a real menace to the farmers.

Behind the banks of a wide irrigation canal thick with green waters, and lined with rows of decapitated palm trees, a large group of buffaloes sat submerged in a swamp.

Ridha looked at them and said they were worse than the plague. “They are destroying the land,” he said. “Their owners let them roam freely. They are heavy, and they break the earth, flood the area and turn the farms into swamps. Sometimes they break into orchards and feed on the young palm saplings; no fence can stand against them.”

The environmental collapse exacerbates the old tensions between the well-armed Ma’dan and the farmers. “If the farmers shoot at them or kill a buffalo, the owners will come armed and start a fight, and we can’t fight them,” said Ridha, “and now only the army can save us.”

SITUATION AT A GLANCE

2.5 MILLION People in Need of Humanitarian Assistance UN – March 2022

961,000 Number of People in Acute Need UN – March 2022

1.2 MILLION Estimated Number of People Internally Displaced in Iraq IOM – December 2022

178,691 Number of Internally Displaced People Residing in Camps CCCM – November 2022

258,541 Number of Syrian Refugees in Iraq UNHCR – December 2022

• Approximately 98 percent of IDPs sheltering in Iraq’s 26 remaining formal camps do not intend to return to their areas of origin or other locations in the country through July 2023, according to a REACH survey.

• Host community members, IDPs, and returnee households lack access to basic services and civil documentation in Iraq, according to regular monitoring conducted by IRC.

KEY DEVELOPMENTS

Returnee Populations Face Severe Living Conditions in Iraq

Of the nearly 5 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) who have returned to areas of origin or other locations in Iraq since March 2014, nearly 600,000—approximately 12 percent of Iraq’s returnee population—reside in locations where they face severe living conditions characterized by limited basic services and livelihood opportunities, ongoing insecurity, and perceived issues of safety and social cohesion, according to an assessment conducted by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) between July and September 2022. The number of returnees reporting poor or severe living conditions during this period increased by nearly 17,500 people compared to the January–March period when IOM last conducted the survey. The assessment identified poor water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) infrastructure and diminishing public water supply, particularly in Anbar Governorate, as the main drivers of the deterioration in living conditions. Ninewa and Salah al-Din governorates continued to host the highest number of returnees reporting severe living conditions, with nearly 256,600 returnees and more than 210,800 returnees, respectively, while the three districts reporting the most severe conditions were all found in Salah al-Din Governorate, according to IOM.

The majority of IDPs sheltering in the 26 remaining formal camps across Iraq’s Dohuk, Erbil, Ninewa, and Sulaimaniya governorates—approximately 98%—do not intend to return to their areas of origin between July 2022 and July 2023, according to an intentions survey conducted by REACH in July 2022 and published in November. Despite this, 58 percent of the IDPs surveyed in Erbil and 75 percent of those surveyed in Dohuk and Sulaimaniya reported that they do intend to return to their areas of origin at some point. IDPs cited damaged shelters in areas of origin, lack of livelihood opportunities, limited financial resources, and persistent insecurity as the primary impediments to return.

Communities in Iraq Lack Access to Basic Services, Civil Documentation

Host community, IDP, and returnee populations lack access to basic services, such as education, health, and shelter support, and face difficulties navigating the legal processes to acquire civil documentation, according to a report released by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in mid-January. Nearly 85 percent of households assessed between July and September 2022 reported difficulties in accessing basic services, with many citing high costs as the main barrier. Moreover, nearly 15 percent of households reported one or more members in need of civil documentation, which is required to access basic services and compensation for losses suffered during the war against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Barriers to acquiring civil documentation include government corruption, harassment— particularly for women and girls—during travel to legal offices, high fees and travel costs to access legal services, lack of awareness of legal procedures, and negative treatment of households with a perceived affiliation to ISIS, according to USAID/BHA sources.

Iraq’s Ministry of Education Plans Permanent Closure of IDP Schools in IKR

In early December 2022, Iraq’s Minister of Education Ebrahim Namis al-Jibouri announced the planned closure of all schools established for IDPs in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region (IKR) by June 2023. The school closures will hinder access to education for many of the estimated 170,000 IDP students who mainly reside outside of camps and are originally from the conflict-affected governorates of Anbar, Diyala, Kirkuk, Ninewa, and Salah al-Din. The decision will likely prompt students to drop out of school or travel to their areas of origin to attend schools, many of which are overcrowded or offer limited services, according to U.S. Department of State Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (State/PRM) sources.

It was meant to be the icing on the cake. The crowning of Iraq as champions of the Arabian Gulf was supposed to bring to a conclusion a tournament that had welcomed Iraq back into the international scene.
Celebrations, however, were overshadowed by the reported deaths of at least four from a stampede which also injured dozens of others ahead of the tournament’s final on January 19. Poor crowd control, awful security protocols and mismanagement resulted in the fatal chaos.

Instead of the focus being placed on sport, the failure of the security forces and resulting tragedy at the final became a metaphor for the gross ineptitude of the Iraqi government and burst the bubble of the two-week high that had been the Arabian Gulf Cup.
With hours to go before kick-off it was clear Iraqi government officials were not in control of the tens of thousands of fans who had descended on Basra’s ‘Palm Trunk’ stadium. Government officials quickly began discussing the possibilities of postponing the final of the tournament or even having it transferred to another neutral country as news of causalities began to spread.
Yet the government should have anticipated such crowds and been much better prepared. It was known the match was sold out and it was expected that those without tickets would attempt to crash the match.
Just two weeks earlier, after having attended the opening ceremony in Basra myself, I had written about how badly organised the crowd control was. It was a disaster waiting to happen as tens of thousands were shepherded through bottlenecked gates.

The failures of the government to prepare for the chaos is akin to the patchwork solutions they have implemented to combat years of malignant corruption and collapsing public services.
Even the infrastructure for the football facilities highlighted how jerry-built the rest of the preparation was. Iraq did invest in constructing a stunning 65,000-seater stadium in Basra, but what about the surrounding infrastructure? Dirt tracks lead up to the stadium. A lack of public transport facilities means that cars must rush towards the stadium down single-lane roads, alongside pedestrians. And on January 19, an inadequate number of turnstiles and riot police contributed to the deaths of excited spectators. The government must be held to account.
But as is usually the case with Iraq, the government – in a press release by the prime minister – chose to brush over the failures and instead praise the security forces. “We are also saddened by the unfortunate incidents that took place” is all Prime Minister Mohammed Al-Sudani said, opting to not address the deaths directly. Instead, his statement — which thanked teams and fans for participating in the tournament — had a self-congratulatory feel to it and referred to the prime minister’s “feelings of hope and pride”.
Iraqi fans of course used the occasion to remind the government of their grievances, as the final was due to kick off, by unfurling a banner of Omar Sadoun, a young protestor who was killed by the country’s security forces during a wave of anti-governmental protests in 2021. In all, around 600 Iraqis had died in the crackdown on those protests.

This is all money which could have been used to bolster Iraq’s failing public services, including crowd control in Basra.
In Basra, for example, more than 100,000 people were hospitalised in 2018 because of a lack of access to clean water. Last summer Basra also suffered from consecutive days without any electricity, despite soaring temperatures, once again sending people to hospital as a result of heatstroke and severe dehydration. This even impacted football matches leading up to the Arabian Gulf Cup as electricity cuts switched off the floodlights during matches.
The corruption can be found in each corner of Iraq’s government, including the health sector. After decades of underfunding, hospitals struggle to care for patients in dire need of treatment. Drugs destined for public consumption often get sold to private businesses with officials pocketing the profits.
Even the sports sector has been impacted by corruption and incompetence. The Basra International Stadium was first opened in 2013. That surrounding roads, turnstiles and access into the stadium have still not been developed a decade later is directly related to the preventable deaths at last week’s final.
What was meant to be a joyous occasion has sadly been shadowed by the unnecessary loss of life.
Iraqis should be proud of the success of their team at the Arabian Gulf Cup. Their government, though, has no reason to feel proud of itself. The stampede in Basra should serve as a reminder to the government that fighting corruption and supporting public services must now become a priority for Iraq to truly progress.
Without that, every win for Iraq will be accompanied by an own-goal.