Iraq on Sunday was yet again covered in a thick sheet of orange as it experienced the latest in a series of dust storms that have become increasingly common.
Dozens were hospitalized with respiratory problems in the center and west of the country.
A thick layer of orange dust settled across streets and vehicles, seeping into people’s homes in the capital of Baghdad.
Photo: AFP
Flights were grounded due to poor visibility at airports serving Baghdad and the Shiite holy city of Najaf, with the phenomenon expected to continue into yesterday, the Iraqi Meteorological Organization said.
“Flights have been interrupted at the airports of Baghdad and Najaf due to the dust storm,” Iraqi Civil Aviation Authority spokesman Jihad al-Diwan said.
Visibility was cited at less than 500m, with flights expected to resume once the weather improved.
Hospitals in Najaf received 63 people experiencing respiratory problems as a result of the storm, a health official said, adding that the majority had left after receiving appropriate treatment.
Another 30 hospitalizations were reported in the mostly desert province of Anbar in the west of the country.
Iraq was hammered by a series of such storms last month, grounding flights in Baghdad, Najaf and Arbil, and leaving dozens hospitalized.
Amer al-Jabri of the Iraqi Meteorological Organization previously said that the weather phenomenon is expected to become increasingly frequent “due to drought, desertification and declining rainfall.”
Iraq is particularly vulnerable to climate change, having witnessed record low rainfall and high temperatures over the past few years.
Experts have said that these factors threaten to bring social and economic disaster to the country.
In November last year, the World Bank said that Iraq could experience a 20-percent decline in water resources by 2050 due to climate change.
Early last month, Iraqi Ministry of the Environment official Issa al-Fayad had said that Iraq could face “272 days of dust” per year in coming decades, the Iraqi News Agency reported.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the