Garbage clogs the banks of the Tigris River in Baghdad, but an army of young volunteers is cleaning it, a rare environmental project in Iraq.
With boots and gloves, they pick up soggy trash, water bottles, aluminum cans and muddy Styrofoam boxes, part of a campaign called the Cleanup Ambassadors.
“This is the first time this area has been cleaned since 2003,” shouts a passer-by about the years of conflict since a US-led invasion toppled then-Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
Photo: AFP
The war is over, but Iraq faces another huge threat: a host of interrelated environmental problems from climate change and rampant pollution to dust storms and water scarcity.
The 200 volunteers at work in Baghdad want to be part of the solution, removing garbage from a stretch of one of the mighty rivers that gave birth to the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia.
“It breaks my heart to see the banks of the Tigris in this state,” said one 19-year-old volunteer, who gave only her first name, Rassel, working under the city’s Al-Aimmah Bridge. “We want to change this reality. I want to make my city more beautiful.”
The task is Herculean in a country where it remains common for people to drop their trash on the ground.
The green banks of the Tigris, popular for picnics by families and groups of friends, are usually littered with waste, from single-use plastic bags to the disposable tips of hookah pipes, especially after public holidays.
“There is a lot of plastic, nylon bags and corks,” said Ali, 19, one of the cleanup event’s organizers.
The group then handed their collected waste to the Baghdad City Council, which took it away, bound for a landfill.
More often the garbage ends up directly in the Tigris. It is one of Iraq’s two major waterways, along with the Euphrates, that face a host of environmental pressures.
The rivers and their tributaries are dammed upstream in Turkey and Iran, over-used along the way, and polluted with domestic, industrial and agricultural waste.
The trash that flows downriver clogs riverbanks and wetlands, and poses a threat to terrestrial and aquatic wildlife.
When the water empties into the Persian Gulf, plastic bags are often ingested by turtles or dolphins, and block the airways and stomachs of many species, a UN report said.
In Iraq — which has experienced four decades of conflict and years of political and economic turmoil — separating and recycling waste has yet to become a priority for most people.
The country also lacks proper infrastructure for waste collection and disposal, said Azzam Alwash, head of the non-governmental group Nature Iraq.
“There are no environmentally friendly landfills, and plastic recycling is not economically viable,” he said.
Most garbage ends up in open dumps where it is burned, sending plumes of acrid smoke into the air.
This happens in Iraq’s southern Mesopotamian Marshes, one of the world’s largest inland deltas, which Saddam once had largely drained. They were in 2016 named a UNESCO World Heritage site for their biodiversity and ancient history.
Today a round-the-clock fire outside the town of Souq al-Shuyukh, which is the gateway to the marshes, burns thousands of tonnes of garbage under the open sky, sending white smoke drifting many kilometers away.
“Open burning of waste is a source of air pollution, and the real cost is the shortening of Iraqi lives,” Alwash said. “But the state has no money to build recycling facilities.”
Even worse is the air pollution caused by flaring — burning off gas that escapes during oil extraction.
This toxic cocktail has contributed to a rise in respiratory illnesses and greenhouse gas emissions, a phenomenon that UN climate experts have voiced alarm about and that the Iraqi government increasingly acknowledges.
Iraqi Minister of the Environment Jassem al-Falahi told the official Iraqi News Agency that waste incineration’s “toxic gases affect people’s lives and health.”
However, there have so far been few government initiatives to tackle Iraq’s environmental woes, and projects such as the Tigris cleanup are leading the way for now.
Ali said he hopes that their effort will have a long-term effect by helping change attitudes.
“Some people have stopped throwing their waste on the street,” Ali said, “Some have even joined us.”
READINESS: According to a survey of 2,000 people, 86 percent of Swedes believe the country is worth defending in the event of a military attack Swedes are stocking up on food items in case of war, as more conflict in Europe no longer feels like a distant possibility, and authorities encourage measures to boost readiness. At a civil preparedness fair in southwest Stockholm, 71-year-old Sirkka Petrykowska said that she is taking the prospect of hostilities seriously and preparing as much as she can. “I have bought a camping stove. I have taken a course on preservation in an old-fashioned way, where you can preserve vegetables, meat and fruit that lasts for 30 years without a refrigerator,” Petrykowska said. “I’ve set aside blankets for warmth, I
FRUSTRATIONS: One in seven youths in China and Indonesia are unemployed, and many in the region are stuck in low-productivity jobs, the World Bank said Young people across Asia are struggling to find good jobs, with many stuck in low-productivity work that the World Bank said could strain social stability as frustrations fuel a global wave of youth-led protests. The bank highlighted a persistent gap between younger and more experienced workers across several Asian economies in a regional economic update released yesterday, noting that one in seven young people in China and Indonesia are unemployed. The share of people now vulnerable to falling into poverty is now larger than the middle class in most countries, it said. “The employment rate is generally high, but the young struggle to
ENERGY SHIFT: A report by Ember suggests it is possible for the world to wean off polluting sources of power, such as coal and gas, even as demand for electricity surges Worldwide solar and wind power generation has outpaced electricity demand this year, and for the first time on record, renewable energies combined generated more power than coal, a new analysis said. Global solar generation grew by a record 31 percent in the first half of the year, while wind generation grew 7.7 percent, according to the report by the energy think tank Ember, which was released after midnight yesterday. Solar and wind generation combined grew by more than 400 terawatt hours, which was more than the increase in overall global demand during the same period, it said. The findings suggest it is
‘ARMED CONFLICT’: At least 21 people have died in such US attacks, while experts say the summary killings are illegal even if they target confirmed narcotics traffickers US forces on Friday carried out a strike on an alleged drug-smuggling boat off the coast of Venezuela, killing four people, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said. The latest strike, which Hegseth announced in a post on X, brings the number of such US attacks to at least four, leaving at least 21 people dead. An accompanying video shared by Hegseth showed a boat speeding across the waves before being engulfed in smoke and flames. “Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed,” the Pentagon chief wrote. He said the strike “was conducted in international waters just off the
RSS