Scenic waterways to cesspool
Once Iraq’s Venice, Basra’s canals have turned deadly
BASRA ( Iraq): Once dubbed the “Venice of the Middle East” for its canals, Iraq’s crumbling port city of Basra is slowly dying of thirst.
Crisscrossed waterways that earned it comparisons with the Italian city are now filthy pools of stagnant water.
Its vibrant freshwater lifeline, the Shatt-al-Arab river that runs through it, is now so polluted it threatens the lives of the more than four million inhabitants of Iraq’s second city.
“It now causes death. It is highly polluted. Different pollutants can be found in the river, including germs, chemicals, toxic algae coupled with unprecedented concentrations of salt almost like that of seawater, rather, it is indeed seawater,” said Shukri al-Hassan, Marine Science lecturer at Basra University.
According to Hassan, contamination levels of Shatt-al-Arab have increased four-fold over the past 10 years and are increasing, putting more and more people at risk.
Daily life also features open sewers and streets filled with fetid piles of garbage. In response, furious residents recently staged some of the biggest protests in years.
Many contrast their impoverish- ment with the oil wealth the province provides to the federal government’s coffers.
State officials blame a public funding crisis wrought by years of low oil prices for the hardship in a city that was a magnet for Middle Eastern tourists until the early 1980s.
Local resident Raad Shabout Dhahar said the water crisis is just one of many problems that have left his 17-member family, including two wives, his mother and 14 daughters, in despair.
“It has become harder because if one used to earn 10,000 Iraqi dinars (RM34.87) a day, one can spend five thousand on food and save the other five, while now, we really started to feel the pinch,” he said.
“Before a quantity of 500 litres of water was enough for us as we used it for drinking only. We did not use it for washing our faces and clothes and we did not use it for bathing. But now, the 500 litres are used also to wash our faces and bodies, too.”
Located where the Euphrates and Tigris rivers merge near the Gulf at Iraq’s marshy southern tip, Basra is one of the few cities in the Middle East without an effective water treatment system.