Cities sinking in pollutants… Water pollution chases the southern Iraqi cities

On the morning of February 16, 2022, Arabic teacher Ali Kazem experienced a sudden stomach ache while lecturing his students at school. Continuous pain, vomiting, and diarrhea prompted his colleagues to taking him to a hospital in the Soq Al-Shuyukh, south of Nasiriya, the center of Dhi Qar Governorate (360 km south of the capital, Baghdad). His condition deteriorated rapidly there, and after a series tests, it was revealed that he was infected with the bacteria (typhoid salmonella), commonly known (typhoid fever).

Ali didn’t need the doctors to tell him that the pollution of drinking water was the cause of his infection, as the water coming through the piping networks from government filtration and purification stations “causes severe abdominal cramps if one drinks it, and one’s eyes feel burning if one washes with it,” he says.

After that incident and fearing a long list of other diseases caused by water pollution, such as cholera, viral hepatitis, and kidney problems, Ali and his family, like many families from the village of “Al-Nasr,” resorted to buying drinking water from private stations that operate using a system known as RO for water purification.”

According to Haider Hantoush, Director of the Epidemiology Department at the Dhi Qar Health Department, the people of Dhi Qar have been forced to use water from private stations for drinking and cooking for about two decades, in light of the government’s chronic inability to provide water suitable for human consumption.

He points out that the governorate, which is inhabited by more than two million people, has suffered from years of drinking water pollution, due to the discharge of sewage into the Gharraf and Euphrates river basins, which feed the dilapidated government drinking water purification stations due to their lack of development.

According to Hantoush, this leads to “increased rates of intestinal diseases, chronic diarrhea, viral hepatitis A-E, typhoid, and the recording of dozens of cases of cholera.”

He adds: “Since June 2022, our directorate has recorded about 1,800 cases of watery diarrhea, and 52 cases of cholera due to high rates of water pollution.”

Many deaths are recorded annually and hundreds of children are admitted to hospitals in critical health conditions due to intestinal diseases resulting from drinking contaminated water, in a governorate known for its large oil fields and being the second largest oil producer in the country, but it suffers from poor service infrastructure and poverty rates that have reached nearly 48% of the total population, according to the spokesman for the Ministry of Planning, Abdul Zahra Al-Hindawi.

The danger is not limited to these diseases, as cancer rates are constantly increasing, and one of the main reasons behind this dangerous disease, as about half of those infected die, lies in environmental pollution. Specialists warn that these cities are now drowning in pollutants of all kinds amid the lack of action by the relevant institutions.

Medical sources in Najaf Governorate, which receives patients from the city and several nearby governorates, including Dhi Qar, stated that the first seven months of the current year 2022 witnessed the registration of more than 2,300 cases of the disease. In addition to the cases recorded in other hospitals in the south, whether in Basra, Nasiriyah or Karbala.

By mid-2019, Dhi Qar alone had recorded more than 4,200 cancer cases. The province’s health department confirms that environmental pollution and war remnants account for 35% of the causes of the disease, while the remaining 65% are unknown.

Government sources talk about recording 2,500 cancer cases as an annual average in the country, but specialists confirm that the numbers are now much higher, and that Basra leads the list of cases due to its high pollution rates.

This investigation documents, based on the results of laboratory tests and official sources, the unsuitability of the water produced by government stations for drinking and cooking, and confirms the high levels of pollution in the raw water (from the Euphrates and Gharraf rivers) that feeds the water filtration and purification networks and stations in Nasiriyah, and shows its repercussions on the lives of residents.

Field Documentation

What we noticed during our visits to three main sewage Wastewater discharge plants in the districts of Batha, Ur and AL-iskan Industrial in Dhi Qar Governorate is the flow of heavy sewage water into the Euphrates River, without any government effort to address the problem, which makes the chances of pollution very high.

This was confirmed by examining samples of raw water arriving at the governorate, where it became clear that there was an increase in aluminum concentrations by (0.6-0.97 mg/L), which far exceeds the concentrations permitted under the Iraqi River Maintenance System Instructions of 1980, which is set at 0.05 mg/L. In addition, the sample contained high levels of iron at a concentration of (850 mg/L), which is more than the permissible limit of (500 mg/L).

The investigator documented 45 sewage outlets, all of it dump their waste into the Euphrates and Gharraf rivers, despite the organic materials, insoluble minerals, and toxic (lethal) substances they contain, according to environmental expert Nouri Al-Maamouri, most notably calcium, magnesium, sulfur dioxide, nitrite, ammonia, and phosphate.

Al-Maamouri confirms: “The more water scarcity worsens and the lower the level in the rivers, which is currently happening due to drought, the higher the density and concentration of these elements.”

According to reports issued by the Iraqi Ministry of Health and Environment in 2019, safe sanitation services cover only 30% of the country’s population, which means that 70% of heavy water ends up in rivers. These reports confirmed that more than 5 million cubic meters of sewage goes into rivers without treatment, which poses a threat to public health.

In 2018, the Parliamentary Health Committee issued a report on the water pollution crisis in Dhi Qar and some governorates, concluding that this pollution is responsible for 25% of child deaths recorded in the country annually.

What exacerbates the problem is that the distillation stations lack bacteriological tests on the water to analyze coliform bacteria and fecal intestinal bacteria, and sometimes the chlorine system stops working (filtration without sterilization), which means that contaminated water reaches citizens’ homes.

This drinking water was the reason for the cholera infection of 14-year-old Murtada Adnan, which led to his admission to Al-Hussein Teaching Hospital in central Nasiriyah in early July 2022. Murtada was not the only one infected, but the villages and alleys of Nasiriyah witnessed multiple infections that reached the same hospital, according to his father, who says that “the symptoms of Murtada’s infection were severe diarrhea and uncontrolled vomiting,” explaining that “infections will continue to appear among the people unless the government rushes to save them from their tragic reality.”

Deadly Pollution

Director of Water Resources in Dhi Qar, Ghazwan Abdul Amir, accuses the sewage and municipal departments in Nasiriyah of causing high rates of water pollution in river basins. To exonerate his department from responsibility, he said, “Our tasks are limited to providing raw water to drinking water purification stations, while the Water Department affiliated with the Ministry of Construction, Housing and Public Municipalities bears responsibility for purifying or polluting the water or not.”

Abdul Amir explains that “the health department in the province is concerned with testing the water after it is purified in the stations, while the Environment Department is responsible for testing raw river water.”

He accused the municipality department of dumping liquid and heavy waste into the rivers, in addition to factories and restaurants dumping their pollutants into open canals and sewers that end in the Gharraf and Euphrates rivers.

Several times, the Water Resources Department in Nasiriyah, according to its director, filed lawsuits against government departments for their violations in the two river basins, but they did not win those lawsuits because the judiciary tends towards those violations as “repelling greater harm with lesser harm,” meaning that disposing of them in the rivers is better than keeping them in the cities, leaving the situation as it is without treating the sewage water, which Abdul Amir describes as dangerous and has caused complete pollution of the Euphrates River. He believes that the best solution to reduce the damage of water pollution is to change the course of the sewage water towards the drains located in various parts of the governorate and then treat it before pumping it back into the rivers. He explains: “The large amounts of pollutants have deprived the Euphrates of its natural ability to purify itself, especially during the current year 2022, which witnessed a significant decrease in water levels due to the drought that the region is suffering from.”

In turn, the advisor to the Minister of Water Resources, Aoun Diab, confirms that water pollution in Dhi Qar and other southern governorates is due to “directing sewage water towards rivers without treatment, in addition to the decline in water levels due to the lack of water releases coming from the source countries, Turkey, Iran, and Syria.”

He points out that the sources of river pollution are diverse, including sewage, health waste, hospital waste, petroleum products, industrial waste, agricultural sector waste and materials, and various alternative liquid and solid wastes that are thrown directly into rivers. “The closer we get to the cities, the more pollution increases and may reach 80%.”

Dhiab describes the handling of the environment and water file in Iraq as “backward” and warns the government of an “environmental and health” disaster in Dhi Qar, unless solutions are found to the sewage problem, saying, “The salts in the rivers turn into more toxic compounds when mixed with sewage pollutants.”

Reports issued by the Iraqi Ministry of Health and Environment three years ago reveal that 50% of pollution problems in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers are due to sewage and waste from government departments, factories, facilities and hospitals that dump their waste into the rivers.

The ministry did not provide more recent statistics, but most of those contacted to provide us with new figures stated that the situation has not improved.

With the negative repercussions of the water scarcity that the country is suffering from, due to the water policies of neighboring countries such as Iran and Turkey, which have cut or reduced their water imports to Iraq, the Iraqi Ministry of Water Resources estimates that Iraq will face a shortage of about 10.5 billion cubic meters of water by 2035, which will increase the rates of drinking water pollution according to specialists.

Old Filters

Every (1 cubic meter) of sewage, industrial and waste water pollutes (40-50 cubic meters) of natural water coming through the main rivers, a fact that is not ignored by the Director of the Environment of Dhi Qar, Karim Hani, who confirms “the expansion of the areas of pollution and its reach to all parts of Nasiriyah.”

As happened with the Water Resources Department, the group of lawsuits filed by the Environment of Dhi Qar did not lead to rulings against the violations of entities from the public and private sectors that cause pollution of the Gharraf and Euphrates rivers.

Hani notes that 23 stations for draining rainwater and sewage, belonging to the sewage and municipal departments, dump their waste into the Gharraf and Euphrates rivers in addition to the general drain and the southern marshes in the governorate, and he says with regret: “They have become large dumps for waste and toxins.”

The issue of drinking water pollution prompted the representative of Dhi Qar Governorate, Nisan Al-Salihi, to demand that the local and central governments open an investigation and prosecute the governmental and civil institutions responsible for the pollution of the sources that supply Nasiriyah with raw water.

She said that “pouring polluted sewage water into the Gharraf River, which is the main source of drinking water in twenty administrative units in the governorate, portends a real disaster that requires an urgent government response.” Al-Salihi stressed the need to issue firm decisions to prevent the disposal of sewage water before it is treated.

The representative attributed the pollution of the running water that reaches homes to “breaks in the transmission pipeline network, the deterioration of purification stations, and the failure to replace the filtration filters.”

She said that “the filters in the stations are old, dating back two years, while they are supposed to be replaced every 6 months, and the water stations lack alum and chlorine.”

to face the repercussions of rising pollution rates, Al-Salihi calls for the implementation of new, highly efficient water projects to address the current imbalance and cover the steady increase in consumption resulting from population growth, pointing to a chronic delay in water projects: “The major reform project that supplies the first and fourth administrative units in the governorate is still suspended despite its completion and receipt by the local government, in addition to the Nasiriyah water project, which is supposed to provide water to about 800,000 people from the districts of Nasiriyah, Souq Al-Shuyukh, Shatrah and Al-Batha.”

Threat the marshes

The effects of pollution are not limited to the cities and villages, but it has also begun to threaten natural life in the marshes, which is what officials in the “Nature Iraq” organization concerned with environmental affairs warn about.

The organization’s director, Jassim Al-Asadi, monitors advanced indicators of water pollution along the rivers and streams connected to the marshes (Al-Jabaish, Al-Fuhud, Al-Wusta, and Al-Western Hamaar Marsh), and the prevalence of intestinal diseases among the population and the buffalo herds suffering from foot-and-mouth disease and their deaths as a result, in addition to the death of fish.

“This is all a result of pumping sewage waste from dozens of stations,” Al-Asadi says with dismay. He warns of the recurrence of the scene of thousands suffering from severe diarrhea and typhoid in Basra and deaths due to them.

He goes on to emphasize, “The quantities of pollutants dumped into the rivers are enormous and almost constant, and do not match the volume of fresh water releases, which is in violation of the instructions of the Law for the Protection and Improvement of the Environment in the Middle Euphrates No. 27 of 2009.”

Al-Asadi does not see any quick solution possible other than the Iraqi government moving to pressure the upstream countries to release large quantities of water to remove larger quantities of toxic materials from the rivers.

Organizations and research centers are recording the migration of the marsh residents towards the city centers in search of potable water. Here, Al-Asadi indicates that their problem will not be solved by moving to the cities, as a result of the river water being exposed to biological pollution and the spread of colon bacteria released from human waste, “which is very dangerous.” He continues: “As well as staphylococcal and swimming bacteria, in addition to toxic substances resulting from sewage water, and salt pollution that is close to 7,000 parts per billion, which is a disaster that threatens citizens and biodiversity in Nasiriyah.” What increases the risks: “Some village and rural residents are forced to use river water directly for drinking without treating it due to the lack of desalination plants in their areas.”

Mutual accusations

In Al-Fidaa neighborhood, central Nasiriyah, Abu Ammar, who has a family and five children, was surprised in July 2022 to find two children in his family infected with hepatitis A and typhoid, due to the contamination of drinking water reaching him through the sewage networks.

During the months of April and May 2022, public health laboratories conducted laboratory tests on samples taken from 358 stations and water complexes in Dhi Qar, and the results showed that the samples failed and were contaminated with bacteria and chemicals, with the exception of only 4 stations.

Director of the Public Health Department in the Dhi Qar Health Department, Dr. Hussein Riyad, says that “the samples were taken from the outskirts of the water stations and main pumping centers and showed high levels of pollution and that the water is unfit for human consumption.”

He adds: “The Dhi Qar Health Department obtains water samples from the outskirts and main pumping centers through its health centers spread across 14 sectors and sends them to the Public Health Laboratory on a daily basis, collects the tests and announces the results of the samples.”

Dr. Riyad defends the accuracy of the tests conducted by his department and calls on the Dhi Qar Water Department to address “the defect that existed before the disaster occurred,” noting that Public Health Law No. 89 emphasizes the responsibility of the Ministry of Health and its departments to monitor the quality of drinking water provided to citizens.

To confirm the existence of a defect, he mentioned the Dhi Qar Water Department’s announcement in 2019 that it did not have sufficient quantities of chlorine in its filtration stations and networks throughout the governorate. “This is why intestinal diseases are spreading, and the governorate records cases of cholera, and we are forced to take preventive measures, especially with the continued failure of the drinking water system.”

The Dhi Qar Water Directorate, affiliated with the Ministry of Construction and Public Municipalities, which is convicted according to the results of the laboratory tests of the Health Department, says through its director, Basem Jarallah, that its laboratories did not find any contamination in the tests it conducted on samples from the same sources from which the Dhi Qar Health Department took its samples.

Jarallah acknowledges the existence of contamination rates (which he did not specify precisely), attributing this to the age of the stations, some of which he said are more than 50 years old. “In any case, the concentrations of chlorine and alum used in them are within the specifications and limits approved by the Ministry of Construction, Housing and Public Municipalities,” Jarallah says confidently. However, the mayor of Al-Fuhoud district in southern Dhi Qar, Zaki Hassoun, responds to the statements of the Water Directorate by saying, “The water produced in the governorate’s stations has proven to be a failure in the laboratory, and is unfit for consumption, as Al-Fuhoud district alone records between 40-50 cases of poisoning daily due to water.” He called for pumping water discharges through the Tigris River, considering that the waters of the Euphrates River are salty and polluted, and will not solve the problem in the district, which has been witnessing a major water pollution crisis for months, according to his words.

Laboratory tests

In early April 2022, Dhi Qar Governorate formed a joint committee from the health, environment and water departments, whose mission is to determine whether the stations’ water is suitable for human use or not.

The investigator tried for two months to obtain the results of the sample tests conducted by that committee, but to no avail, due to its members’ secrecy and keeping them away from the media. However, sources in the Dhi Qar Governorate Diwan provided him with them, which were as follows:

“The water of the Gharraf and Euphrates rivers arriving at the water purification and filtration stations in Dhi Qar is not suitable for drinking because it is polluted, and the water produced in 30 stations and water complexes throughout the governorate is not suitable for human consumption, and they are out of 45 water complexes, according to the tests of April 2022. As for May, the results showed that 17 water complexes failed the bacterial test out of 26 complexes. In June, the results of the samples of 35 stations showed that 21 of them were unsuitable due to high levels of bacterial contamination.”

The percentages of E.coli and Coliform bacteria in the tested drinking water samples exceeded 90 colonies per 1 ml, while the approved specifications stipulate that it should be zero mg/l according to standard specifications No. 417 of 2009 of the Central Agency for Standardization and Quality Control.

 Also, the results of the bacterial count T.P.C. of drinking water in the tested stations exceeded 295 cells/ml, contrary to the permissible percentages, in addition to being completely free of chlorine, while the specifications stipulate that the chlorine percentage should not be less than 5-2 mg/l within the project and 0.3 mg/l at the farthest point in the network, which is the minimum required to prevent diseases transmitted through water, and the turbidity percentage in the tested stations reached more than 130 NTU.

The results conducted by the Central Statistical Organization in the Ministry of Planning showed that 1,790 samples out of 2,306 failed, and the failure rate exceeded 77.6 according to bacteriological tests, which means that 77.6 of the water produced by water production stations in the governorate, estimated at 656,985 m3/day, failed and is not suitable for human consumption, which is the highest rate among all other Iraqi governorates.

The Ministry of Planning’s test documents indicate that the tested samples failed the bacteriological test that determines the suitability of water from a health perspective, the chlorine test that determines the presence of the sterilizing material necessary to protect water from bacterial pollutants, and the turbidity test that determines the safety of sterilization and its efficiency.

This was confirmed by a medical source in the Dhi Qar Health Department, who said that “laboratory tests proved that the water was not suitable for drinking, cooking food, or using it in bakeries, and that the percentage of contamination exceeded 80%, distributed between bacteriological, chemical, and physical contamination.” In addition, documents obtained by the investigator issued by the Financial Supervision Bureau in 2019 confirmed the unsuitability of drinking water produced in most projects, stations, and water complexes in Dhi Qar. The tests conducted proved that 831 samples out of 1022 failed, and as for the results of the tests of the samples taken from the tap water, 2366 out of 2945 samples failed.

Various Infections

Director of the Epidemiology Department at the Dhi Qar Health Department, Haider Hantoush, warns that water pollution means that citizens are vulnerable to “severe diarrhea, cholera, and high rates of viral hepatitis and typhoid fever.”

Hantoush describes the water reaching citizens’ homes as “raw water” as if it was transported directly from the river, referring to the failure of filtration processes “which forced citizens to rely on water sterilized by RO devices, which is also unsafe as it is easily contaminated and is transported to homes by unspecialized and unlicensed workers, thus forming polluting media.”

Hantoush advises residents to use chlorine tablets or boil water to sterilize it before using it for drinking and cooking, and called on those who are financially able to rely on sterilized and bottled water sold in the markets.”

The lack of clean water for consumption and the inability of thousands of families to buy sterile water, makes hospitals full of infected people, according to what a responsible medical source in the Dhi Qar Health Department reveals, conveying shocking numbers of infections recorded by the governorate’s hospitals in the first half of 2022 due to water pollution. He lists: “15,000 cases of watery and chronic diarrhea, as well as 860 cases of typhoid, 70 cases of viral hepatitis, and 11 cases of cholera.” The source indicates that 80-90% of the infections resulted from drinking (runoff) water produced in water purification plants in Nasiriyah.

These results were less than those seen by the investigator and included in a report by the Central Statistical Organization of the Ministry of Planning for the year 2020, as 401 cases of viral hepatitis and 7 deaths were recorded, and 33,010 cases of diarrhea were recorded for the age group under 5 years, including 10 deaths. However, the fear of contamination is not related to contracting these diseases that have a cure, but rather to their significant impact on increasing the incidence of fatal cancerous diseases. The Cancer Center in Dhi Qar Health announced in mid-2019 the presence of more than 4,200 cases of cancer, estimating the annual infection rate at between 900 and 950 cases, while the death rate among those infected is between 400 and 500 cases annually.

Is RO water a solution?

For years, Abu Haidar’s family of eight has been accustomed to using local RO water. Haidar, who is eighteen years old, says, “I don’t remember how long we have been buying this water for drinking and cooking instead of tap water. My father says they were forced to do so since the fall of the former Iraqi regime in 2003.”

The price of a 20-liter plastic bottle is 500 dinars (about 34 cents), an amount that may not be available to many families with limited incomes who include a large number of individuals and consume several bottles daily, which costs them an additional 20-30 thousand dinars per month.

However, this water may not be completely safe, as some of the private stations that produce it work without official government approvals and with primitive equipment that lacks the required health and environmental specifications, and their workers lack the minimum health safety conditions,” according to the Director of the Epidemiology Department at the Dhi Qar Health Department.

 The majority of Nasiriyah residents rely on RO water, similar to the residents of Basra and Muthanna governorates, as the total number of government stations that produce RO water is 78 stations, while there are hundreds of private stations as well, most of which operate informally and in violation of the Water Department’s regulations.

“This is an ongoing disaster that never stops killing us,” said Ali Ismail, a bachelor’s degree holder whose home is located near a sewage outlet in Nasiriyah. “It’s not just severe diarrhea and typhoid, it’s deadly cancers that are on the rise because of the toxins around us. We live and die slowly in this deadly environment and no one cares.”

The investigation was conducted by Al-Aalem Al-Jadeed newspaper and supervised by the NRIJ network.