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Banned
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Ustwo, you want to persuade me that the same administration that fucked the pooch so pathetically in NOLA has pulled off some kind of "miracle reversal" in Iraq?
Quote:
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5...YRSz43-tYNO7fQ
Baghdad drowning in sewage: Iraqi official
Feb 3, 2008
BAGHDAD (AFP) — Baghdad is drowning in sewage, thirsty for water and largely powerless, an Iraqi official said on Sunday in a grim assessment of services in the capital five years after the US-led invasion.
One of three sewage treatment plants is out of commission, one is working at stuttering capacity while a pipe blockage in the third means sewage is forming a foul lake so large it can be seen "as a big black spot on Google Earth," said Tahseen Sheikhly, civilian spokesman for the Baghdad security plan.
Sheikhly told a news conference in the capital that water pipes, where they exist, are so old that it is not possible to pump water at a sufficient rate to meet demands -- leaving many neighbourhoods parched.
A sharp deficit of 3,000 megawatts of electricity adds to the woes of residents, who are forced to rely on neighbourhood generators to light up their lives and heat their homes.
"Sewerage, water and electricity are our three main problems," said Sheikhly, adding that many of these problems date back to the Saddam Hussein regime when not enough attention was paid to basic infrastructure.
Insurgency, sectarian violence and vandalism since the US-led invasion in March 2003 had further ravaged services in the capital, he added.
More positively, he said, the extensive Baghdad security plan, known as Operation Fardh al-Qanoon (Imposing Law) and launched on February 14 last year, was allowing services to be gradually restored.
"After the destruction there is now the reconstruction," Sheikhly said. "We have solved many of the security problems, now we can focus on rebuilding.".....
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Quote:
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/176513.html
Published: 2/8/2008
Cholera Crisis Hits Baghdad
Iraqi capital fears an epidemic if stricken sewerage system collapses as the rainy season arrives
Baghdad is facing a 'catastrophe' with cases of cholera rising sharply in the past three weeks to more than 100, strengthening fears that poor sanitation and the imminent rainy season could create an epidemic.
The disease - spread by bacteria in contaminated water, which can result in rapid dehydration and death - threatens to blunt growing optimism in the Iraqi capital after a recent downturn in violence. Two boys in an orphanage have died and six other children were diagnosed with the disease, according to the Iraqi government. 'We have a catastrophe in Baghdad,' an official said.
The United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) said 101 cases had been recorded in the city, making up 79 per cent of all new cases in Iraq. It added that no single source for the upsurge had been identified, but the main Shia enclave of Sadr City was among the areas hardest hit.
As Iraq's rainy season nears, its aging water pipes and sewerage systems, many damaged or destroyed by more than four years of war, pose a new threat to a population weary of crisis. Claire Hajaj, a spokeswoman for Unicef, said: 'Iraq's water and sanitation networks are in a critical condition. Pollution of waterways by raw sewage is perhaps the greatest environmental and public health hazard facing Iraqis - particularly children. Waterborne diarrhea diseases kill and sicken more Iraqi children than anything except pneumonia. We estimate that only one in three Iraqi children can rely on a safe water source - with Baghdad and southern cities most affected.'
Although US forces in Baghdad have found that security is improving, on daily patrols they face complaints from residents about streets plagued by piles of household waste and fetid cesspools, often near schools and where children are playing. Captain Richard Dos Santos, attached to the 3rd squadron of the 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, said that in the al-Hadar area of south Baghdad sewage pumps were only 30 to 40 per cent operational. 'There is sewage near schools and there is an increased threat of cholera and flu in winter when resistance is low,' he said.
The UN has reported 22 deaths from cholera this year, and 4,569 laboratory-confirmed cases, almost exclusively in northern Iraq where it was first detected in Kirkuk in August. It has now spread to half of the country's 18 provinces, but anxiety is focused on Baghdad.
Unicef said it was providing oral rehydration salts and water purification tablets for families - it distributed three million to the worst hit areas two weeks ago - as well as jerry cans at water distribution points. It is transporting 180,000 liters (47,552 gallons) of safe water per day to Baghdad's worst hit districts.
Unicef issued an urgent appeal to the Iraqi government to clean water storage tanks in all institutions as one preventive measure. Hajaj said: 'Only 20 per cent of families outside Baghdad have access to sewage services, and Iraq's sewage treatment plants operate at just 17 per cent of capacity.'
Cholera is preventable by treating drinking water with chlorine and improving hygiene, but it is estimated that around 70 per cent of Iraqis do not have access to clean water. Many have been too poor or too afraid to go out to buy bottled water, relying instead on tap water, often from polluted sources. Companies responsible for collecting waste and sewage have been reluctant to enter Baghdad's most violent areas.
The government has been trying to educate Iraqis through advertisements on TV and in newspapers and with leaflets handed out at checkpoints. But it admits that six hospitals have unsafe water supplies.
By Guardian Unlimited © Copyright Guardian Newspapers 2008
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<h3>Seems like hellish living conditions in Baghdad, thanks be to Allah that so much of the population had escaped this misery via death or by violence driven evacuation from the city.....and that there are so few remaining to further tax the deteriorating municipal utlities infrastructure.</h3>
Quote:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...%20ref=opinion
Is the US really bringing stability to Baghdad?
To judge from the talk in Washington, the 'surge' that put 30,000 more US troops on the ground in Iraq has succeeded in bringing stability to a nation still riven by ethnic, religious and tribal conflict. Life, the Pentagon boasts, is returning to normal. But the truth is a very different story.
An Iraqi soldier mans a checkpoint in Baghdad © AFP/Getty Images
More pictures Related Articles
A week in Iraq: 'People say things are better, but it's still terrible here'
Iraq death rate belies US claims of success
Bush: pace of withdrawal from Iraq may have to slow
By Patrick Cockburn
Friday, 15 February 2008
....The only source of money in Iraq is oil revenues, and the only jobs – four million, if those on a pension are included – are with the government. The Shia, in alliance with the Kurds, controlled both. "The Sunni people found that the only way to be protected from the Shia was to be allied to the Americans," said Kassim Ahmed Salman, a well-educated Sunni from west Baghdad. "Otherwise we were in a hopeless situation. For the last two years it has been possible for Sunni to be killed legally [by death squads covertly supported by the government] in Baghdad."
The "surge" – the 30,000 extra US troops implementing a new security plan in Baghdad – has helped to make Baghdad safer. <h3>In effect, they have frozen into place the Shia victory of 2006.</h3> The city is broken up into enclaves sealed off by concrete walls with only one entrance and exit.
Areas that were once mixed are not being reoccupied by whichever community was driven out. Bassim can no more reclaim, or even visit, his house in the Jihad district of Baghdad than he could a year ago. He can still work as a taxi driver only in Sunni areas. The US military and the Iraqi government are wary of even trying to reverse sectarian cleansing because this might break the present fragile truce.
"People say things are better than they were," says Zanab Jafar, a well-educated Shia woman living in al-Hamraa, west Baghdad, "but what they mean is that they are better than [during] the bloodbath of 2006. The situation is still terrible."
Baghdad still feels and looks like a city at war. There are checkpoints everywhere. "You seldom see young girls walking in the streets, or in restaurants," adds Zanab Jafar, "because their families are terrified they will be kidnapped, so they send private cars to pick them up directly from school." New shops open, but they are always in the heart of districts controlled by a single community because nobody wants to venture far from their home to shop.
For all the talk of Baghdad being safer, it remains an extraordinarily dangerous place. <h3>One Western security company is still asking $3,000 to pick a man up at the airport and drive him six miles to his hotel in central Baghdad.</h3> The number of dead bodies being picked up by the police every morning in the capital is down to three or four when once it was 50 or 60.......
.........Even the police chief of Fallujah, Colonel Feisal, the brother of Abu Marouf, cheerfully explained that until he was promoted to his present post in December 2006 he was "fighting the Americans". Abu Marouf is threatening to go back to war or let al-Qa'ida return unless his 13,000 men receive long-term jobs in the Iraqi security services. The Iraqi government has no intention of allowing this because to do so would be to allow the Sunni and partisans of Saddam Hussein's regime to once again hold real power in the state.
<h3>Bizarrely, the US is still holding hundreds of men suspected of contacts with al-Qa'ida in Afghanistan and elsewhere, while in Iraq many of the Awakening members are past and, in many cases, probably current members of al-Qa'ida being paid by the US Army.
"I knew a young man, aged 17 or 18," says Kassim Ahmed Salman, "who was a friend of my brother and used to carry a PKC [a Russian light machine-gun] and fight for al-Qa'ida. I was astonished to see him a few days ago in al-Khadra where he is a lieutenant in al-Sahwa, standing together with Iraqi army officers."</h3>
The present state of Iraq is highly unstable, but nobody quite wants to go to war again. It reminds me of lulls in the Lebanese civil war during the 1970s and 1980s, when everybody in Beirut rightly predicted that nothing was solved and the fighting would start again. In Iraq the fighting has never stopped, but the present equilibrium might go on for some time.
All the Iraqi players are waiting to see at what rate the US will draw down its troop levels. The Mehdi Army is discussing ending its six-month ceasefire, but does not want to fight its Shia rivals if they are supported by American military power. Al-Qa'ida is wounded but by no means out of business. Four days after I had seen Abu Marouf, who was surrounded by bodyguards and maintains extreme secrecy about his movements, al-Qa'ida was able to detonate a bomb in a car close to his house and injure four of his guards.
Protestations of amity between Shia security men and Awakening members should be treated with scepticism. My friend, the intrepid French television reporter Lucas Menget, filmed a Shia policeman showering praise on the Awakening movement. He introduced two of its members, declaring enthusiastically to the camera: "You see, together we will defeat al-Qa'ida." Back in his police car, the policeman, lighting up a Davidoff cigarette and shaking his head wearily, explained: "I don't have a choice. I was asked to work with these killers."
Iraq remains a great sump of human degradation and poverty, unaffected by the "surge". It was not a government critic but the civilian spokesman for the Baghdad security plan, Tahseen Sheikhly, who pointed out this week that the city is drowning in sewage because of blocked and broken pipes and drains. In one part of the city, the sewage has formed a lake so large that it can be seen "as a big black spot on Google Earth".....
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I read the crap above and I'm thinking, boy....what a bargain....and it only took five years, cost 3,500 American lives, 20,000 serious American casualties and an immediate expense of $500 billion, leaving the US with a "broken" ground force, worn out combat troops, empty national guard equipment lots and military motor pools packed with wornout, broken down, light to heavy duty mechanized transport and combat equipment.
What a bargain, and Ustwo, you're a victim of the influence of Lincoln group military propaganda! At least the Pentagon hasn't paid a "good news" distribution service to shepherd me to my opinion of this disaster.
Last edited by host; 02-17-2008 at 11:52 PM..
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