Iraq’s government has identified hundreds of polluted sites that pose huge health hazards, but insecurity and lack of funds are stifling attempts to make them safe, a minister said on Wednesday.
With violence gripping the country, campaigners are struggling to draw attention to environmental damage caused by the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, the 1991 Gulf War and waste discharges by industry struggling during years of sanctions.
“We have identified more than 350 priority polluted areas, which include amounts of hazardous chemicals and depleted uranium,” Environment Minister Nermeen Othman said on the sidelines of a major U.N. environment conference in Kenya.
Environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists have linked depleted uranium used in U.S. and British munitions to higher Iraqi cancer rates and birth defects after the 1991 war and called for swift clean up campaigns. But Othman said her staff were also at risk from violence.
“The situation is not easy. Even a team going to record soil samples is taking their lives in their hands just by going to many of these areas,” she told reporters.
With the help of U.N. Environment Program experts, two dangerous sites — the Al Qadissiya metal plating facility south of Baghdad and the Al Suwaira pesticides warehouse east of the capital — had been cleaned, Othman said.
But she said more funds were urgently needed to tackle four other polluted “hot spots,” like the Khan Dhari petrochemicals site west of Baghdad that was partly burned down by looters during the war in March 2003.
Others include one of the world’s biggest sulfur mines, Al Mishraq, south of Mosul, which was also put out of action by a fire and looters in 2003, and the Ouireej military scrap yard on the southern outskirts of the capital, which remains piled high with unexploded bombs and bits of destroyed Iraqi tanks.
“We are also studying another 25 priority areas for action after that,” the minister said.
The other huge task on the horizon is cleaning up high levels of pollution in rivers and drinking water, Othman said, which is complicated by widespread shortages of electricity.
“Without power we cannot pump water and we cannot clean it,” she said. “It is a big challenge for us.”
