By Maha El Dahan and Raya Jalabi
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His complaints are echoed across a country overwhelmed by the cost of rebuilding from its war with Islamic State and struggling with water shortages that have led to street protests this year. Much of the city of Mosul, 30 km to the northwest of Qaraqosh, is still rubble more than a year after the militants were expelled. In Iraq’s long-neglected south, there have been angry demonstrations over water shortages. The government has promised to release funds to help. It estimates the total cost of Iraq’s reconstruction at $88 billion.
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Drought could be mitigated by irrigation but, critics say, Iraq’s political leaders are too consumed by infighting to pay attention to the needs of farmers in places like Nineveh. Zainab al-Taaey, a member of the outgoing parliament’s Committee on Agriculture, Water and Resources, said the Ministry of Water Resources was not doing enough to tackle water shortages. The ministry responded that it was working to clean up the water supply in Nineveh and dig wells to help farmers.
Other critics say inefficiency and corruption are starving Nineveh of funds. Iraq ranks 169 out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s corruption index. Another committee member, Sherouk al-Abaigy, said successive governments had failed to come up with a comprehensive water plan. The ministry said the security situation across Iraq, where Islamic State still poses a threat, and a lack of funds were complicating its efforts, but it continued to work in Nineveh. It said its engineers were capable of implementing big projects and noted that Minister of Water Resources Hassan Janabi was a technocrat with a PhD in water management.
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In the summer of 2014, Islamic State fighters arrived, and Abdel Rahman fled to the safety of Erbil, in Kurdish northern Iraq. He said the militants tried to make the pump work but they didn’t know what they were doing and damaged the equipment. Fighters looted cables from the station, and most of North Al-Jazeera’s smaller subsidiary pumps, bridges and canals were wrecked in the battle for Nineveh that started in 2016. When that conflict subsided, another threatened: The pump sits in territory also claimed by Iraq’s Kurds. In Oct. 2017, Iraqi forces launched another offensive and took back control of the area.
When the fighting stopped, Abdel Rahman was eager to resume his work. But he found a scene of destruction. One hundred of the irrigation system’s 280 canals are still out of commission, according to the United Nations. Many are filled with debris and explosives planted by the militants in an attempt to keep government forces at bay. Thirty of the 38 metal bridges have been blown up and 800 sections of elevated canal have been destroyed.
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