“Shortsighted politicians” are condemned for chronic neglect of the southern Iraqi province of Basra’s water resources that culminated in the hospitalization of 118,000 people in 2018 in the report that warned “government has failed to act to prevent the same thing from happening again in the future.”
“Basra will continue to face acute water shortages and pollution crises in the coming years, with serious consequences, if the government doesn't invest now in targeted, long-term, and badly needed improvements,” said Lama Fakih, acting Middle East director of Human Rights Watch.
Remaining date palms in Basra. Farmers in the governorate have lost many of their date palms after years of irrigating their land with sea water which has intruded into the Shatt al-Arab, destroying the soil and killing off their crops. Photo: Belkis Wille | HRW
While the 2003 US-led invasion is often given as the volta for the deterioration of Iraq’s water and sanitation services, Monday’s report explicitly asserts that deterioration is due to multiple government failures dating back to the 1980s.
A slew of factors including “poor management of upstream water sources, inadequate regulation of pollution and sewage, and chronic neglect and mismanagement of water infrastructure” have caused the waterways to deteriorate, the report noted.
Basra gets its water from the Shatt al-Arab, a river formed where the Euphrates and Tigris rivers meet. The city’s sewage flows into open canals that join the waterway, mixing with industrial pollution from the oil industry as well as from neighbouring Iran.
Water contamination has also caused severe environmental damage, with oil spills, raw sewage, garbage and the high salt content of its waterways threatening the biodiversity of its waterways, killing date palms and fish.
Water crises have been a source of unrest in Basra and beyond.
The mass hospitalization of Basra’s residents provoked deadly protests in the city last summer, with anger also fueled by power blackouts, unemployment and the presence of multinational oil companies in the city. Demonstrations soon spread across the country and were met with violent repression, killing 14.
In the face of a crisis little improved, smaller scale protests have been reoccurring nationwide this summer.
Basra’s water crisis has most impacted the poorest sections of society, who, reliant on clean water for income but struggling to access it, and then pay for the resulting harm caused by contaminated-water consumption.
Human Rights Watch has found evidence of a likely large harmful algal bloom along the Shatt al-Arab in the middle of the city of Basra that may have contributed to the health crisis in the summer of 2018. Satellite image date October 28, 2018. Graphic: DigitalGlobe-Maxar Technologies; Source: European Space Imaging
“Each year I was getting 50 percent of the yield of the year before, and then in 2018, almost nothing survived. In 2018, the salinity level in the water was so high that I could grab the salt from the water with my own hands. I am dying of thirst and so are my children. There were four cases of poisoning in my family. I have no money and I cannot take them to the hospital. Where do I get the money from?” Jaafar Sabah, a farmer from Abu al-Khasib, a poor town to the southeast of Basra, told HRW.
Iraq’s water shortages have been exacerbated by regional power tussles. Iraq is heavily reliant on water flow from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, both originating in Turkey, while the Euphrates is fed by rivers from Iran.
The development of dams and reservoirs upstream has dramatically reduced Iraq’s water flow. A relent of the stranglehold on the country’s water input is unlikely, with the imminent filling of the Ilisu dam, part of Turkey's Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP), set to worsen matters.
Water has often been a sticking point in meetings between the two countries, with repeated failure to reach formalized agreements on its fair distribution.
But this winter’s exceptional rainfall appears to have put the issue on the backburner.
Raw sewage running through a street in central Basra city, next to the public al-Baradi'yah water treatment plant, and into the Shatt al-Arab. Photo: Belkis Wille | HRW
"While solving Basra's water crisis will take serious planning, time, and money, it is possible to address so long as authorities take their responsibilities seriously. The alternative is deadly."
An ambitious $180 billion plan for the long-term alleviation of Iraq’s water crisis was set to take effect in 2014, but war with Islamic State (ISIS) that same year saw the reallocation of funds for badly needed infrastructural projects to military reinforcements. Water ministry funding shrunk to “almost zero.”
Though Basra remains heavily dependent on NGO funding for development of its water infrastructure, government investment has seen “reassuring” increases since the territorial defeat of ISIS at the end of 2017 — though at $760 million, it remains a fraction of the amount allocated in 2018.
