Industry News
A Year in Iraq
By USAID
Nov 1, 2004 - 10:41:00 PM

Washington, DC -- The emergency relief and reconstruction aid delivered to Iraq during the 12 months since the fall of Saddam Hussein in April, 2003, was the biggest U.S. foreign aid program since the Marshall Plan, obligating $3.3 billion in help to Iraq’s people.

This text explains how the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) have supported Iraq’s recovery from three decades of tyranny and mass murder.

Water and Sanitation

An Iraqi engineer checks water flowing from a new treatment plant built with U.S. and CPA aid. It provides 40,000 people in southeast Iraq clean drinking water. The city’s only source had been contaminated water from a branch of the Tigris River.

“I used to get sick from the river water,” said the engineer.

Untreated sewage flows directly into the Tigris and Euphrates.Many wastewater treatment facilities are inoperative due to vandalism,deliberate neglect, and a lack of parts, electricity and chemicals. To end this, the U.S. is spending $217 million repairing water systems throughout Iraq, directly benefitting 14.5 million people. Contractors have already repaired hundreds of breaks in the water network, significantly increasing water flow.

Iraqi workmen cleaning a waste water plant, part of a massive USAID effort to provide clean water and improve health throughout the country.

In Baghdad, one water plant is being expanded and three sewage plants are being repaired, improving daily water flows to hundreds of thousands of people.We are installing back-up electrical generators at 41 Baghdad water facilities and pumping stations to ensure continuous water supply. Repairs to Baghdad’s sewage treatment plants—Rustimiyah North, Rustimiyah South, and Kerkh—will benefit 3.8 million people by October 2004.

Other rehabilitation projects include two water plants and four sewage plants in Najaf, Karbala and Hillah; the entire Sweet Water Canal system near Basra; the Safwan water system; and water and sewage plants in Kirkuk and Mosul.

Since the early 1990s, Iraqi children died in very high numbers. Much of this is directly attributable to the deliberate neglect of the country’s waste water facilities and the draining of the southern marshlands. The death rate has been so high—hundreds of thousands over the past 12 years—that in parts of the South it may be tantamount to infanticide.

Source: USAID

Editor's Note: The following was excerpted from USAID's "A Year in Iraq". Full document can be read online at: http://www.usaid.gov/iraq/pdf/AYearInIraq.pdf

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