World Water Day: Canada helps turn taps on in Iraq

[Mosul Dame Lake in Iraq/Amber Nasrulla]

Walking along the bottom of Mosul Dam Lake provides evidence of Iraq’s water shortage. A giant feeder pipe lies cracked and rusting, surrounded by large rocks on the uneven, hard-baked landscape. The wind whips up fine dust. In the distance a sign of hope: a new pipe descending into the sparkling lake, courtesy of the Canadian government.

“They saved us,” said Hasan Taher, a civil engineer and manager of the Department of Surrounding Water-Dohuk, told Yahoo Canada News. “From the 1980s until now the people were suffering from water shortages.”

Life for residents in Khanke, a village in Dohuk district close to Mosul Dam Lake, worsened in the summer of 2014 when Iraqis from the south fleeing ISIS flooded in, stressing an overburdened system. Internally displaced persons (IDP) now number more than 18,000.

“It was a very big problem,” said Taher. He paused then added, “Actually we were overwhelmed. The IDP camps were turning into cities.”

Tuesday is World Water Day, a UN initiative founded in 1993 that celebrates clean water around the planet. It also highlights the people who are suffering from water-related issues. According to UN estimates, one-tenth of the world’s population does not have access to safe water, increasing their likelihood of suffering from infectious diseases and premature death. The residents of Khanke know they’re lucky to have benefitted from Canada’s timely water work in their region.

Khanke’s storage tank had limited capacity and people in the IDP camp were sharing that water with residents so they could only access water for two to three hours every three days.

The system limped along until last summer when World Vision Canada, backed by a US$1.3-million grant from the Canadian government, rehabilitated the water treatment facility on Mosul Dam Lake. It is fed by the Tigris River and serves Khanke’s 22,000 residents in addition to the camp and other IDP camps. Now camp residents can access water for at least six hours a day and there are communal water tanks throughout the camps that families share.

Taher, of Dohuk’s water directorate, said the importance of the Khanke project can’t be overstated: “It gives people hope.”

Yet they worry. They know this resource is precious. They aren’t alone. From Flint, Mich., to Southern California to indigenous communities across Canada, water is polluted and increasingly, in short supply.

[A broken pipe at Mosul Dam Lake in Iraq/Amber Nasrulla]

The Khanke project was a Harper government-funded infrastructure project that slaked the thirst of Christians, Muslims and Yezidis in the Kurdish Region of Iraq (KRI). The new Trudeau government has similar objectives and intends to fund like-minded infrastructure projects in Iraq. Given the increasing number of IDPs and refugees in KRI, however, the projects are going to be larger in scope.

For example, a $5-million water and hygiene project funded by Canada is already planned for seven Dohuk communities and one in the newly liberated area of Ninewa, by the French humanitarian NGO, Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development (ACTED).

Global Affairs Canada says that the huge population influx is straining municipal services, particularly in the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector, which already experienced challenges and the project is crucial for the health of both internally displaced Iraqis and host populations.

As Michael Callan, Global Affairs Canada’s director of development for the Middle East and North Africa wrote in an email, the ACTED project “seeks to mitigate the negative impacts of IDP influx in KRI through enhanced access of populations to quality WASH infrastructure.“

A community might welcome needy and suffering people — at first — but when resources are limited, tensions soar. So projects like water purification, installing water tanks and drilling boreholes, can relieve the pressure.

Michael Wicker, the Khanke project’s chief engineer, echoes the sentiment.

“Reconstruction and investing in hygiene infrastructure can take the pressure off the host community and it really helps both local residents and IDPs in the long run.”

Wicker, a WASH specialist with World Vision International’s Syria Response team, explained that in four months last summer, work teams were able to:

· replace old filtration units and pumps with new ones;

· rehabilitate a crumbling water pump;

· install a new water purification system;

· install a new 200,000-litre concrete water tank to supplement two existing ones;

· most importantly, they put down four-kilometres of pipeline from the storage tanks in order to transport water to residents and IDP camps.

Canada’s infrastructure work continues against a constant threat — the Mosul Dam, which is downstream of Khanke, is said to be close to collapse. The dam was built between 1981 and 1984 under the instructions of Saddam Hussein. It began leaking in 1986 and there are numerous sinkholes downstream.

A report released in February by U.S. Army engineers stated: “Mosul Dam is at a significantly higher risk of failure than originally understood and is at a higher risk of failure today than it was a year ago.” U.S. Army Lt.-Gen. Sean MacFarland told The Associated Press in Baghdad in January, "All we know is when it goes, it’s going to go fast and that’s bad.”

What are the implications for the people of the Dohuk district, living upstream of the Mosul Dam? It means the water level in the reservoir has been lowered to the minimum to reduce the pressure on the dam.

“In the last month we have moved the location of the intake three times,” said Taher, adding that this work takes two or three days. So people sometimes have to wait for water.

The Dohuk water directorate can’t control the fate of the dam. Nor can the refugees or residents of Khanke. They make do with what they have. For now they are happy. As one Yezidi mother living in an IDP camp in Khanke said, “The water tastes delicious.”