go backReport on IWP - November15, 2015
The day this brief report is
written---November 15, 2015---ISIS-claimed terrorist bombings in Paris are
staining the front pages of newspapers all over the world. What lift some people
think they achieve as they ascend to the skies upon their own pyrotechnics and
the blood and fragments of complete strangers, is well beyond the understanding
of any of us. But it is well worth remembering that governments all over the
world do the very same---the stronger the government the greater the
destruction---except without the suicidal satisfaction, or so they think. Might
not Blowback be some weird form of unconscious suicide? Is there a discipline
within International Political Psychology that can do a seminar on this
question?
Another sad item dominating
contemporary headlines has been our own country’s lethal attack upon the MSF
hospital at Kunduz. Apart from the approximate number of victims--- doctors and
staff together with helpless patients cremated in their beds---little is known
for sure about causality and responsibility, and we can hardly be blamed for
suspecting the US government will keep it that way. The fog of the Afghanistan
war will never lift so long as they keep seeding the clouds.
Wide international attention to
this incident puts in mind of a point of contact the Kunduz attack has with the
Iraq Water Project. Back in 2006, after IWP had financed reconstruction of
several municipal and rural water filtration plants, a decision was made to
scale back escalating costs by sending small, relatively inexpensive
purification units to schools and hospitals in various parts of Iraq, and to
keep doing this while funding lasted. We are still at it. The very first
hospital to receive an IWP unit was in alQaim, a city on the Euphrates River
just inside the Iraq/Syria border. Part of the reason for selecting this
particular hospital was that its maternity ward and adjacent areas had been
flattened a few months before by US ordnance, the military circumstance being an
attempt by US forces to seal off a major corridor for insurgents infiltrating
from Syria. I cannot say whether the damage to the alQaim hospital was
deliberate, unlike the case of Kunduz, where no one is denying intentionality. I
don’t recall casualty figures, if we ever knew them. We used to have a video
filmed by somebody at the wrecked hospital and posted on this website, but it
has evaporated.
Still, one distinct difference
between the two events is that the alQaim destruction did not receive media
attention. There were no internationals working at that hospital, just Iraqis,
and who cares about them. We, conversely, were provided the opportunity to
assist these people via our Iraqi engineer friend Faiza, who had just started
cooperating with our project at that time. Faiza was acquainted with one of the
doctors working at alQaim. Sad to say, this skilled and dedicated physician
subsequently had to flee with his family into Kurdistan when ISIS swept through
that part of Anbar province. What became of the two water units we sent to the
hospital is unknown; the fog of war has blotted the sun.
As mentioned above, Iraq Water
Project is still in business after 16 years. Over the past six or seven
months we have enabled our partner organization in Nassiriya to install reverse
osmosis filtration units at two area schools and two clinics, one medical the
other dental. We also funded repair and maintenance through this group for 15
previously placed water purifiers. This is in addition to 15 other units they
repaired a few months previously. We have picked up the costs of monthly
maintenance for filters placed with our help by Muslim Peacemaker Teams in Najaf.
I think we are now doing a reasonably good job of follow-up on our projects, but
of course this does not obtain with the hospital at alQaim or some of our other
previous placements that have been sucked into the black hole of Iraq’s
unending conflict. Check the August 2011update for further information.
Pending work includes 4 water
units for a heart disease center in Nassiriya and water cooler/filtration units
proposed for two schools in Diyala Province (Life for Relief and Development).
One last thing. Previous to the
Paris terror assaults, news outlets reported that Kurdish peshmerga forces had
driven ISIS out of Sinjar in northern Iraq. Let us hope it is true and
permanent, though by now Sinjar city may well be a desolation unfit even for
owls. Sinjar was another town Iraq Water Project tried to help some years ago,
largely because it had been the site of what at that time was the single most
lethal terrorist attack against an Iraqi population, in this case Yezidis. 500
people were killed in two separate bombings and who knows how many horribly
wounded. Faiza, with her wide Iraqi connections, knew a Yezidi engineer in
Sinjar and in two installments we managed with his help to place four units in
clinics and schools. Whether those buildings are even standing is, of course,
unknown to us, nor do we know the whereabouts of our Yezidi friend the engineer.
What an interesting world has been
put in place by the violent fanatics of the Middle East and their godfathers,
the cold and calculating---it would be an unearned kindness to label them
“blind”---creators of American foreign policy.
Thanking everyone for your attention and interest in Veterans for Peace Iraq Water Project, now in its 16th year
Art Dorland, project chair