Rebuilding Mosul key to keeping Daesh out
TIRED OF WAITING FOR GOVERNMENT ACTION, VOLUNTEERS BEGIN URGENT JOB OF RECONSTRUCTION IN IRAQI CITY
“Even if we work every day for the next six months, we still won’t finish this job — we don’t have enough support or equipment,” says Mohammad Shaban, an officer of the Civil Defence Force in west Mosul, in the exhausted tone of someone who is unable to separate his life from his work.
Shaban and his colleagues were recovering as many as 30 bodies a day in August last year, one month after the fighting ceased. More bodies still lie under the rubble along the banks of the Tigris river, where the last bloody battles were fought. “We are working with our hands and it is so hard,” says Shaban. He is still waiting to be paid.
Thoughts of rebuilding Mosul are far from the minds of the men tasked with recovering the dead. The true number of the lives lost in the battle against Daesh here — when, in the final months of the campaign, families trapped by Iraqi forces had no escape from air strikes and snipers — is not known, but AP reported nearly 10,000 civilian deaths; the UN found the figure to be 2,521 at a minimum. The old city, once Mosul’s economic centre and beating heart, became a burial chamber.
But when Iraqi forces pushed Daesh out of their last urban stronghold in Mosul — leading the Iraqi prime minister Haider Al Abadi to declare 10 December a day of celebration — a new job began: the work of moving on. Across the city, volunteers began to clean streets, libraries and universities — to reinvigorate a city that had been suppressed under Daesh.
Slow progress
Progress is slow. Fifteen neighbourhoods were razed to the ground; coalition air strikes destroyed all five bridges across the Tigris, and power plants, factories and water treatment plants were looted and burnt.
Three months on, much of west Mosul seems frozen in time. Furniture and concrete spills out of blasted buildings into the narrow streets. Drivers cross the Tigris on two temporary bridges and swerve to dodge craters in the roads. Corpses are still buried in the rubble.
Rebuilding has been slow elsewhere in Iraq, too. Parts of Ramadi and Fallujah and all of Sinjar are still in ruins, years after Daesh was driven out. The danger now is that the joy of reclaiming Mosul from Daesh will be ruined if it isn’t followed by the swift return of security, homes, jobs and schools; by an overhaul of corrupt and weakened institutions; and by a psychological reckoning of what has been lost.
The delay is primarily due to questions over who will foot the bill. At a donor conference in Kuwait last month, Iraq asked its allies to help with the $88 billion (Dh323 billion) cost of rebuilding the war-torn country. It managed to secure $30 billion in pledges of credit and investment, including $3 billion from the US (by contrast, the US-led coalition spent more than $14 billion on operations related to Daesh).
The Iraqi government will have to cover the bulk. Merely stabilising west Mosul so families displaced during the war can return will cost $700 million, says Lise Grande, the United Nations Development Programme representative for Iraq. “It is double what we expected because the destruction in western Mosul during the final stages of battle was much, much more widespread than in eastern Mosul.”
Displaced Iraqis
Meanwhile, more than 2.3 million Iraqis remain displaced, including nearly 700,000 from Mosul. Peace is not enough for them to return home — they need accommodation, education and employment. For that, buildings and infrastructure must be repaired. With prices forced upwards by the shortage of undamaged housing, many families cannot pay rent, and risk being displaced again.
“The old city is completely destroyed,” says Ahmad Saleh Al Jabouri, Mosul’s assistant municipality director, speaking in his large office on the east side of the city, not far from Mosul University. “I don’t know how much it will cost to rebuild Mosul, but it will be billions of dollars.” The municipality alone owes $7 million, he says, including unpaid salaries for street cleaners.
Private sector to grow
Iraq, struggling under slumping oil prices, has set aside $337 million for reconstruction. It hopes foreign investment in reconstruction, transport and business will encourage its nascent private sector to grow, taking some of the burden off the state.
Abdul Kader Sinjari, the deputy governor of Nineveh, says matters are nowhere near that point. “Every factory was destroyed, and the ones that weren’t destroyed were looted — so how can we make Mosul a business-orientated city again?”
Iraq’s bloated and corrupt public sector is also working against it. Dating back to Saddam Hussain’s Baath Party and UN sanctions in the 1990s, kickbacks and graft have inflated the price tags of recovery efforts. Though prime minister Al Abadi pledged greater transparency after the war, he has not yet succeeded in changing the culture of bribery. There are fears that if it is not addressed, state institutions will not be able to guard against a potential resurgence of Daesh.
In November the governor of Nineveh, Nofal Hammadi, was dismissed amid allegations of corruption, but refused to leave office. Residents say the political instability ahead of elections in May and December this year is diverting attention from rebuilding.
When Iraqis head to the polls, they want to see politicians resolved to tackle corruption, not just protecting a system that benefits them, says Sajad Jiyad, managing director of the Bayan Centre, a research institute in Baghdad. “I think some progress is being made, but by and large people are waiting to see the first bit of action, for the government to really tackle corruption forcefully.
“They want to see progress, and I think their patience is starting to run out.”
“This is my city,” says Ali Nazm, 29, from the back seat of a car as the hulking ruins of Mosul University flash by. He is one of many volunteers who took to the streets to help with the clear-up efforts after the fighting stopped. “If I don’t clean it, who will?”