BAGHDAD'S ACUTE WATER SHORTAGE-ANOTHER CASUALTY OF WAR

Iraq, U.S. move to avert Baghdad water shortage

By Tim Cocks 1 hour, 26 minutes ago
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080508/wl_nm/iraq_water_dc

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Baghdad's crumbling roads, burst sewage pipes and chronic water shortages are casualties of war that get little attention amid the daily litany of gunfights, bombs and bloodletting in Iraq.

As summer approaches, the city is facing an acute shortage of drinking water despite the efforts of officials like Sadiq Shumari, its director of water services.

Temperatures are set to reach 50 Celsius (122 Fahrenheit) and demand for the precious commodity will outstrip supply.

"We have a huge task to rehabilitate the water system, which has been neglected for decades, but it's a challenge with such poor security," Shumari told Reuters on a trip to the eastern neighborhood of New Baghdad, one of the city's poorest.

"Insecurity is a problem, but what doesn't get as noticed is how it hinders the provision of services which the people need to live," he said, before two loud blasts nearby sent him and some U.S. troops running for cover inside a building.

Lying far to the east of the Tigris River as it snakes through Baghdad's more upmarket districts, the dusty, overcrowded streets of New Baghdad are visibly poor.

Children in torn clothes play in the dirt, next to festering piles of trash and opaque puddles of stagnant water.

A man wearing a traditional long, white robe sits on a brick outside his house listening to an old battery-powered radio.

Next to him, a child attempts to negotiate a path between a ditch full of foul-smelling rainwater and a manmade mountain of polythene bags, Coke cans, plastic bottles and cigarette packets.

Even the services in Sadr City, a notoriously deprived slum to the north of New Baghdad and home to 2 million people -- where U.S. and Iraqi forces are battling Shi'ite militiamen loyal to populist cleric Moqtada al-Sadr -- are more reliable than here.

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