$14 million for towns in Iraq’s ‘triangle of death’

 

By Mahmoud al-Yasseri

 

Azzaman, April 9, 2005

 

The interim cabinet has allocated $14 million to improve public services in three of the most restive and violent towns in the country.

 

The money, according to Zaki Mattar of Baghdad’s Water Department, will go to Latifiya, Yousifiya and al-Rasheed, which are scenes of daily battles between insurgents and U.S. and Iraqi forces.

 

The towns, south of Baghdad, are almost no-go areas for Iraqi troops and police and on Saturday the insurgents killed 15 Iraqi soldiers traveling in an area close to Latifiya south of Baghdad.

 

The towns are situated in a lawless region, known in international press as ‘the triangle of death.’

 

Mattar said his department “will construct 24 water projects to provide one million gallons of water a day.”

 

New water pipes will be extended in the area to carry drinking water even to remote villages in the area, he said.

 

Contracts for the implementation of the 24 projects are ready and will be announced “in a few days,” he said.

 

Eventually, the department will lay a nearly 17-kilometer long network of pipes in the three towns, Mattar said.

 

Power and clean water are still scarce in Iraq two years after Baghdad fell to U.S. troops.

 

The reconstruction of the war-ravaged country has yet to start and many Iraqis still drink water directly from rivers and wells.

 

Public service projects in the three run-down towns are in urgent need of rehabilitation.

 

Even in Baghdad, sewage water inundates many streets and mostly flows untreated into the river.

 

But Mattar said his department had executed 211-kilometer long of pipes in Baghdad and the outlying towns in the past year and that 90% of water projects in these areas have been rehabilitated.