Iraq

“A study conducted by the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations Development Program [UNDP] shows that 20% of the population is affected by poverty”, Leila Kazem, director-general of the department of social affairs at the labour ministry, told Agence France-Presse. “Some 2 million Iraqi families live under the poverty line, as defined by international criteria, which is fixed at one [US] dollar per day per person.”

The decline in living standards is caused by “the rise in unemployment, violence, and the decline in public sector and civil service jobs amplified by the war”, Kazem added.

“The number of people [receiving] social assistance by our minister is dwarfed by the large number of people in need”, she said, adding that “only 171,000 families across the entire country receive social assistance”, compared to the 2 million needing it.

A study released in November 2004 by Iraq’s health ministry in tandem with Norway’s Institute for Applied International Studies and the UNDP said children are paying the silent cost of the post-invasion rise in the number of impoverished Iraqi families. Malnutrition rates are now roughly equal that of Burundi, a central African nation torn by more than a decade of war.

The report added that acute malnutrition among Iraqi children had nearly doubled since the occupation began, with nearly 400,000 Iraqi children suffering from “wasting”, a condition characterised by chronic diarrhea and dangerous deficiencies of protein.

Nearly three years after United States and allied forces invaded Iraq and toppled the Saddam Hussein's government, the human rights situation in the country remains dire. Thousands of civilians have been killed and abuses amid the ongoing conflict are widespread. Attacks by armed groups are marked by the disregard for civilian lives and the basic rules of international humanitarian law. Adequate safeguards against torture and ill-treatment are not in place in Multinational Force detention facilities, and thousands are held without charge or trial. Likewise, reports of torture, ill-treatment and lack of judicial process at the hands of Iraqi authorities are on the rise.

Following the reinstatement of the death penalty in August 2004, executions resumed in 2005; Iraq executed 13 prisoners in March 2006. The trial of Saddam Hussein and other members of the former government remains mired in difficulties; the tribunal must ensure fair proceedings in order to establish the rule of law and afford justice for the many victims of crimes committed under the rule of Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath party. Amnesty International remains concerned that the death penalty is a possibility in this and other cases.

Following the elections in December 2005, the parliament has yet to elect a new Prime Minister and Presidential Council; negotiations are underway to form an inclusive government where the three religious and ethnic groups (Shi'a, Sunni and Kurds) would be represented.

The rising tide of disease in Iraq could kill more people than the military conflict has, according to the country's Ministry of Health.

In the first official government survey of Iraq's health since a number of countries, known as the coalition forces, invaded in March 2003, a detailed report reveals a crumbling health service unable to deal with an epidemic of typhoid, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases.

Disruption to water supplies during the conflict means that roughly 20% of urban households now have no access to safe drinking water. This has led to 5,460 cases of typhoid in the first quarter of 2004, the report estimates. In rural areas, more than half of households are without fresh water or adequate sanitation.

Measles and mumps are infecting thousands of children, partly because a third of them are chronically malnourished, it is reported. There were 8,253 cases of measles reported in the first half of 2004, with Basra particularly badly hit. In 2003, there were just 454 cases.

Likewise, the first four months of 2004 saw 11,821 cases of mumps, nearly 5,000 more cases than there were in the whole of the previous year.

Although Iraq has enormously valuable oil reserves, an estimated 27% of the population live now on less than $2 a day. Life expectancy has fallen to below 60 years of age for both men and women.

As well as addressing current health concerns, the report also details the Iraqi health service's 15-year decline under Saddam Hussein's rule. "More Iraqis may have died as a result of ... neglect of the health sector over the past 15 years than from wars and violence," says Alwan in the report.

Alwan adds that Iraq's health is now comparable with countries like Sudan and Afghanistan; 15 years ago it rivalled that of rich nations such as Jordan and Kuwait. "Iraq used to be the place to go in the middle East for clinical care," says Burnham.

Despite the rise in infectious diseases, cardiovascular disease still ranks as the number-one killer in Iraq. This is largely owing to poor diet and a very high prevalence of smoking, but it is exacerbated by a lack of public health initiatives to change the population's lifestyle.

BAGHDAD, 12 Oct 2004 (IRIN) - Health experts in Iraq are worried that the number of sexually transmitted HIV/AIDS cases may be on the rise, following the discovery of new trends in modes of transmission.

"The trend of how a person is infected has changed from initially via blood transfusions to sexual transmission and this will shape the magnitude of the coming national strategic plan," Dr Wahab Hamed, director of the AIDS Research centre in Iraq and manager of the National AIDS Prevention Programme, told IRIN in Baghdad.

According to Hamed, in the years before 2003 they detected around seven HIV positive cases per year, practically all of them related to haemophiliacs (who require blood transfusions to tackle an impaired ability to control bleeding).

In the last year the number has doubled and changed its route of transmission, he added.

Fifteen new cases have been detected over the past few months, which is considered a high number in such a short period of time. What worries the medical experts is that 90 percent of these cases were infected through sexual contact.

"It is a situation that should be controlled before there is an outbreak," Hamed added.

The HIV/AIDS control programme, part of the Iraqi Ministry of Health, was established in 1987 as a response to the first case detected in the country, when blood transfusions for haemophiliacs were found to be carrying the virus.

Since then, the programme undertook a wide range of activities concerning the prevention and control of HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted infections (STIs).

According to the AIDS research centre in Iraq, a total of 448 HIV/AIDS cases, including those who died of the disease, have been detected since 1987.

At present Iraq has a total of 67 newly detected cases, of which 15 were reported in 2004. Of this figure, 25 were infected through sexual transmission, six are children who caught the virus from their mothers who were HIV positive when they got pregnant, 35 were through blood products used by haemophiliacs, and one was from a separate blood transfusion case.

In all cases the patients are HIV positive but have not yet developed full blown AIDS.

During Saddam Hussein's regime, some access to treatment reducing the impact of HIV/AIDS was available. But at the same time patients often suffered from discrimination and were sometimes kept away from society and treated like criminals.

Organized gangs allegedly took over blood centres on the country's borders, charging entrants a fee to avoid taking the test. Today an AIDS test is free of charge, but during Saddam's time US $50 was charged for the examination.

After the fall of Saddam Hussein, programme activities were halted as a part of the destruction of the health infrastructure and communication with registered HIV/AIDS cases was also lost. The main hospital for HIV/AIDS in Baghdad was looted and damaged along with the main central and peripheral HIV laboratories.

As a rapid response, the World Health Organisation (WHO), along with the Ministry of Health, allocated funds for HIV positive people and resumed health care for them in a relatively short period of time. However, many challenges and difficulties still face the programme, according to officials.

Voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) has now been introduced in the country for the first time as an added screening method.

Although Iraq lies in the category of having a low prevalence rate, according to a 2002 WHO report, the health authorities believe that the figures are largely underestimated, due to the limited development of health facilities and their ability to cope with HIV/AIDS/STI care and prevention.

Prevention campaigns, according to Dr Hamed, are one of the difficulties, as the killer disease is still a taboo subject in the country. "We will start step by step in order not to shock the population," Dr Hamed said.

Efforts will start with radio messages asking people to take a free test at a care and prevention centre in Baghdad. TV advertisements were a long way off, he said.

Under the previous regime there was no public information about how to prevent the disease. However, on World AIDS day, the government gave air time to the Ministry of Health to talk about the subject on TV.

"If we had more information from the media in our country, maybe I could have prevented myself from getting this disease. It is terrible and I hope that people will know more about it in the future," one HIV-positive person told IRIN.

Another problem that carriers of the virus face is the shortage of antiretroviral drugs. Many of the drugs that were in hospital stores were looted or damaged, and due to their high cost the government is having difficulty in replacing them quickly.

"We have had a meeting with the Ministry of Health to discuss our problem and we asked for $1 million to complete our work, but it hasn't being released yet," Dr Hamed said.

The Ministry of Health has invested $100,000 to date in the AIDS research centre in Iraq, together with other investments by WHO, but much more is required for the total finishing of the project.

WHO has been covering many activities at the centre and at other sites around the country. One of the first programmes that should be started quickly is the training of personnel since 95 percent of staff in Iraq are not trained in line with current standards, equipment and treatment methods.

"We are working on a full programme including the education of the health professionals in the total process of prevention and management of HIV/AIDS in Iraq," Dr Naeema Gasseer, director of the WHO Iraq office based in Amman, Jordan, told IRIN.

She added that they have been working hard in the area of blood transfusions in order to prevent infected donations from being accepted at hospitals across the country.

For those who may lose their loved ones to HIV/AIDS, help cannot come soon enough. "I may lose my son. But I ask God to help those people reach all the Iraqis and prevent others from being infected from this terrible incurable disease," a mother of an HIV-positive young man told IRIN.

Home to millions of birds, the marshes of what is modern-day Iraq are among the most important in the Middle East. As a regional oasis, these marshlands for centuries provided fertile land and clean water for millions of people.

”I hope the images of the environmental catastrophe of the first Gulf War are not repeated in 2003,” ornithologist Mike Evans told Tierramérica, recalling how he saw thousands of aquatic birds die after Iraqi troops set fire to more than 600 oil wells as they withdrew from Kuwait in 1991.

A photo of a little bird, a grebe, blackened by petroleum was seen by people around the world at the time, and became a symbol of one of the worst oil spills in history.
Such oil disasters might not happen this time around, but military experts say it is still relatively early in the war.

The marshlands of Mesopotamia (Al Ahwar, in Arabic), where civilizations of the Babylonians and Sumerians flourished, are today extremely fragile -- and they are in the line of fire in the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

The ecosystem forms part of the Tigris and Euphrates river basin, which provides sustenance to Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran.

But the heart of the wetlands lies in southern Iraq, along the border with Iran and near big cities like Basra, which is currently suffering a profound humanitarian crisis, following the overwhelming attack launched by the United States and Britain on Mar 20.

There, too, the first oil well fires of this war burned. Around a dozen total, but now apparently they have been brought under control.

The more than 1,600 oil wells in Iraq represent a time bomb for the marshes, as well as the potential contamination of the ecosystem by the use of conventional weapons as well as weapons of mass destruction, the passage of hundreds of war vehicles through the surrounding desert and the mass mobilisation of refugees.

But the bulk of the damage has already been done. Thrashed by the impact of human activities over the years, just seven percent of the original extension of the marshlands remain, around 20,000 square km.

When Hassan Partow visited the area in 2002, along the Iran- Iraq border, he was heartbroken. Where recently one of the most impressive natural spectacles had been recorded -- millions of exotic migratory birds filling the skies -- he found a desert landscape, one that had been depopulated and was now highly militarised.

Partow is a member of a team of specialists from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) that in the days after the beginning of the U.S.-led attacks issued a new alert about the tragic disappearance of 93 percent of Mesopotamia's wetlands since 1970.

”It is incredible to think that an ecosystem that took millennia to be formed could be destroyed in so few years,” Partow told Tierramérica.

This fast pace of destruction has one main cause: the ambitious ongoing water and drainage projects of Iraq and its neighbours that share the river basin, particularly Turkey, which has built 30 dams.

But the series of armed conflicts in the area (the Iran-Iraq War from 1980 to 1988 and the 1991 Gulf War) have also played a part. Explosive mines were placed throughout the watershed, which sustains a half-million Ma'dan, the original inhabitants of the marshlands, and the habitat of numerous plant and animal species, particularly birds, some of which have already become extinct.

UNEP says that if urgent action is not taken, the wetlands of Mesopotamia could disappear completely within five years.

Wetlands destruction ”is the most serious environmental problem in the area today, both in terms of biology and in the population's access to safe water. In the Middle East, water is more important than oil,” Jonathan Lash, president of the Washington-based World Resources Institute (WRI), said in a conversation with Tierramérica.

Until recently, the marshes sustained the region's multi- million-dollar freshwater shellfish industry and supplied 60 percent of the Iraqi freshwater fish market.

The thousands of ducks and geese that filled local markets -- a crucial source of protein for Iraqis since the post-Gulf War embargo began -- also came from those marshlands.
Wetlands also served to purify the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates, which flow into the Persian Gulf, a body of water that is renewed by currents from the Indian Ocean only every three to five years.

The destruction of the marshes, say experts, may also affect the region's climate, with grave consequences for the habitat of nearly 400 bird species.

Although no species has been declared globally extinct, at least three of incomparable beauty have disappeared from Iraq: the sacred ibis, the African anhinga and the goliath heron.
Ornithologist Evans, of the Britain-based non-governmental BirdLife International, says experts are worried about several species, particularly the aquatic birds, ”because they are more vulnerable to chemical and oil spills than land birds.”

At least eight percent of Iraq should be declared a protected area for birds, says BirdLife International.

Wetlands devastation has also hurt the arable lands of southern Iraq. The idyllic oasis inhabited by the Ma'dan during the past 5,000 years has collapsed. Left landless and caught in the crossfire, the descendants of the Sumerians have had to move elsewhere. Of the 95,000 refugees displaced from their homes from 1991 to 1993, 40,000 were Ma'dan. Today, many live in misery in encampments in Iran or in Iraq's cities.

With or without the direct effects of the current war, a flow of water from reservoirs in Iran and Iraq would be needed in the short term to restore the wetlands, says UNEP's Partow.

However, only an integrated management plan that involves Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria could prevent the extinction of the area's marshes, he adds.

Efforts of the past decades were in vain. Iraq has failed to sign important international agreements like the 1971 Convention on Wetlands (signed in Ramsar, Iran) and the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity. Baghdad has also refused field studies of the area, meaning that the existing research is based largely on satellite images.

In 1994, when we drew up the first report on wetlands, we tried to involve Iraqi scientists, but it was not possible. We must re-establish dialogue to achieve the equitable use of the river basin,” Jean-Yves Pirot, head of the wetlands and water resources division of the Worldwide Fund for Nature, told Tierramérica.

UNEP will head up environmental assessments in post-war Iraq. But nobody dares hope that the environmental question will be at the centre of the post-war debate.

”I know people at USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development) and the State Department who are concerned about these issues, but whether they will be given top priority, that is something I can't predict,” said WRI president Lash.

Following the invasion of Kuwait, UN sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1990 badly affected education in Iraq. During the 2003 U.S.-led occupation, the education system continued to deteriorate.

According to UNESCO, until 1989 Iraq had been allocating 5% of its budget to education. This percentage is higher than the maximum rate in developing countries, which stands at 3.8%.

Tens of thousands of new schools were built across Iraq between 1960 and 1990. In the 1990's, during the UN sanctions on Iraq, the number of schools needing urgent repair in central and southern Iraq reached over 83%. This number has increased since the war on Iraq in 2003. U.S. appointed Iraqi authorities have started a campaign to reconstruct Iraqi schools.

Reconstruction

Muzhir al-Dulaymi, spokesman for the League for the Defense of Iraqi People's Rights, told Aljazeera.net that contracts for reconstructing schools in Iraq are not adequate to upgrade educational premises to the required standard. "Companies are winning bids worth millions of dollars to reconstruct schools, but in fact schools have only been painted. No improvement to the infrastructure, and no new equipment has been bought," said al-Dulaymi.

Aljazeera's correspondent in Baghdad says the painting was not exactly part of the reconstruction plan, but was carried out to change the characteristics of Saddam Hussein's time. "Schools were painted to wipe out slogans on school walls put up during the Saddam Hussein era," said Harif.

Anmar al-Azzawi, an Iraqi citizen told Aljazeera.net that students have seen nothing new in their schools, although ministry of education officials promised many new changes.

Iraq was unable to build new schools during 1990-2003 — the period of UN sanctions. In 1980, 500 pupils attended one school building, while in 2003 the number has risen to 4,500 pupils for each school building.

The U.S. occupation authorities handed over the ministry of education to Iraqis last month. Al-Dulaymi says they did this to avoid the headache of having to fulfill their promises. "They handed over the ministry of education to Iraqis. The question is, are they willing to spend enough money to develop education in Iraq? Will the occupation authorities give Iraqis the right to allocate enough money to reconstruct their education system? Let us see what the future brings."

Children out of school

The number of children under twelve who have left school in order to earn a living has been significantly increasing since the UN sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1990.

UNESCO reports say that before the sanctions 95,692 students dropped out of school. In 1999, following nine years of sanctions, 131,658 Iraqi children were out of school. The number has increased since the occupation of Iraq and is unlikely to go down in the near future, despite promises made by U.S. appointed Iraqi authorities. Leaving school before twelve used to be an offense in Iraq, a law established in the 1970's. This law has become invalid since the collapse of the Iraqi state in April 2003. "The number of children out of schools is not monitored any longer," Harif said.

Earning a living is not the only reason children are leaving school. The security and political situation is also a major contributing factor. "There are people who have stopped sending their children to school fearing they may be kidnapped," says Harif. "Also a large number of children have left school in Shia areas to join the al-Mahdi army."

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