Iraq: 35,000 people might be forced to leave their homes in Diyala because of water shortages

Speaking to Alghad Press on Wednesday, Mohamed Dayfan al-Obeidi, the head of al-Azim City Council highlighted how people in the city suffer from a “severe drinking water shortage for the fifth day in a row due to power blackouts and damage to water pipelines”. He warned that if this situation continues, over 35,000 residents will be forced to leave their homes in al-Azim city in northern the province, blaming persistent power cuts for the failure of water pumps to supply the city with water. He also added that water pipelines coming from the Tigris River have also “sustained severe damage due to maintenance of optical fiber cables without our knowledge”. Al-Obeidi urged the government and the other bodies concerned to swiftly intervene to save the recently-liberated city from a great disaster that could force residents to leave their homes in search for water and other basic services. Also Iraqi water resources minister Hassan Janabi said that the amount of water flowing in key Iraqi rivers has fallen by at least 40 percent in recent decades due to construction of dams and other water-holding facilities in upstream Turkey and Iran, as well as increasingly erratic rainfall across the region. Damage to Iraq’s own dams and other infrastructures have been caused also by years of fighting and by a recent earthquake, making water supplies more irregular.