This year, an unprecedented fiscal crunch caused by low oil prices forced the government to suspend infrastructure investments. But new dams alone won’t save Iraq’s waterways, experts warn.
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/ 27 January 2009
A pilgrimage could prevent thousands of Iraq’s Shi’ite Muslims from voting in an upcoming election.
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/ 9 December 2008
For the first time since the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraqis could be seeing election candidates kissing babies and canvassing neighbours.
Militants loyal to Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr clashed with Iraqi security forces throughout Iraq’s southern oil hub of Basra for a second day on Wednesday. A health official said 40 people had been killed and 200 wounded in the first day of the clashes, including civilians, gunmen and Iraqi security forces.
Iraqi security forces fought raging battles with gunmen from radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Shi’ite militia in Basra on Tuesday amid a crackdown on armed groups in the southern city. British military officials said Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was in Basra to personally oversee the major security force sweep in Iraq’s second largest city.
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/ 24 February 2008
Western oil giants are poised to enter southern Iraq to tap the country’s vast reserves, despite the ongoing threat of violence, according to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s business emissary to the country. Basra has been described as ”the lung” of Iraq by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
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/ 12 December 2007
Sixty people were killed or wounded by car bombs in the capital of mainly Shi’ite Maysan province in southern Iraq on Wednesday, hospital sources said. The bombs exploded in a car park and a market place in the city of Amara, the sources said.
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/ 3 September 2007
British troops were quitting the southern Iraqi city of Basra overnight in a move that will end the British presence in the oil hub for the first time since the United States-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003. The pull-out is another step towards handing over Basra province to Iraqi control and paving the way for an eventual withdrawal of British forces from Iraq.
Iranian forces seized 15 British Royal Navy personnel who had searched a merchant ship on Friday, Britain said, triggering a diplomatic crisis. Britain said the incident took place in Iraqi waters, where it routinely boards merchant vessels with United Nations permission to search them. The UK Foreign Office summoned Iran’s ambassador.
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/ 1 November 2005
At least 20 people were killed when a car bomb exploded in the southern Iraqi port city of Basra late on Monday, an interior ministry source said. ”Twenty people, mostly civilians, were killed and 45 wounded in the car-bomb attack in a crowded market in Basra,” the source said in Baghdad, citing police reports from Basra.
Fourteen marines were killed on Wednesday in one of the deadliest attacks on United States forces since the invasion of Iraq as an American freelance reporter was gunned down in the relatively calm south. Meanwhile, Iraq’s panel drafting the new Constitution met again in Baghdad to discuss the finer details of the basic law.
The chief of police in Basra admitted on Monday that he had effectively lost control of three-quarters of his officers and that sectarian militias had infiltrated the force and were using their posts to assassinate opponents. General Hassan al-Sade said half of his 13 750-strong force was secretly working for political parties in Iraq’s second city and that some officers were involved in ambushes.
At least 68 people were killed and about 100 wounded in a series of five attacks on Wednesday against police forces in the southern, British-occupied port city of Basra in Iraq and nearby Zubair. Britain reported ”many” Iraqi casualties, but no known dead or injured among coalition forces.
The UN’s World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Wednesday it expected a cholera epidemic in southern Iraq, where 17 cases have already been registered in two hospitals, and warned that other infectious waterborne diseases could break out.