After years of war and drought, Iraq’s bumper crop is burning

Daesh beaten in Iraq and Syria, but remnants' crop burning hits harvest hard. (File/AP)
Updated 20 June 2019
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After years of war and drought, Iraq’s bumper crop is burning

  • Since the harvest began in April, crop fires have raged across Diyala, Kirkuk, Nineveh and Salahuddin provinces while the government, battered by years of war and corruption, has few resources
  • Daesh has claimed responsibility for burning hundreds of hectares of farmland in Diyala, Kirkuk and Salahuddin provinces as well as Syria

BAQUBA/NINEVEH PLAINS, Iraq: Iraqi farmer Riyadh woke on May 13 to find his wheat crop ablaze. In his fields in Diyala province, he found the remains of a mobile phone and plastic bottle which he believes was an explosive device detonated in the night to start the fire.
Riyadh and his neighbors in Sheikh Tami village put out the blaze and saved most of his crop but hundreds of other farmers in Iraq have been less fortunate since Daesh urged its supporters to wage economic warfare with fire.
Since the harvest began in April, crop fires have raged across Diyala, Kirkuk, Nineveh and Salahuddin provinces while the government, battered by years of war and corruption, has few resources to counter a new hit-and-run insurgency.
The government in Baghdad is playing down the crisis, saying very few fires have been started deliberately and only a fraction of the country’s farmland has been affected.
But officials in Iraq’s breadbasket province Nineveh warned that if the fires spread to storage sites, a quarter of this year’s bumper harvest could be at risk, potentially ending Iraq’s dream of self-sufficiency after years of disruption due to drought and Daesh rule.
Iraq declared victory over Daesh in December 2017 but the militants have regrouped in the Hamrin mountain range which extends into the northern provinces — an area described by officials as a “triangle of death.”
In recent weeks, Daesh has published detailed instructions online about how to carry out hit-and-run operations and weaken the enemy by attrition — without taking losses.
“It looks like it will be a hot summer that will burn the pockets of the rejectionists and apostates, as well as their hearts,” Daesh wrote in its Al-Naba newspaper last month, referring to Shiite Muslims and Sunnis who do not subscribe to its interpretation of Islam.
Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi said last week that only about a 10th of the fires were the result of sabotage, with the rest caused by electrical faults, cigarette butts or faulty agricultural machinery.
He said just 40,000 donums (10,000 hectares) of wheat and barley had been destroyed by fire nationwide, a tiny proportion of the estimated 13 million donums of cultivated land.
“We are following up on the issue but it must not be blown out of proportion,” he told a weekly news conference on June 11.
‘Invisible hands’
Figures cited by federal officials, however, don’t tally with data given by officials and farmers in 10 areas of Diyala, Nineveh and Salahuddin provinces visited by Reuters. Based on their figures, at least 145,000 donums had gone up in flames in those areas alone by June 16.
The prime minister said there had been 262 fires nationwide this year, but Salahuddin’s civil defense chief told Reuters there were 267 fires during May in that province. Officials in Diyala also said the federal figures were too low.
In Nineveh, which accounts for almost half Iraq’s cultivated land with 6 million donums devoted to grain, officials recorded 180 fires between May 18 and June 11. By June 10, 65,000 donums of wheat and barley had gone up in flames in the province, well above Baghdad’s estimate for all of Iraq.
“Some days we have 25 fires reported,” Nineveh’s agriculture chief Duraid Hekmat told Reuters in his Mosul office.
During a 48-hour visit to Nineveh, Reuters witnessed five major fires and thick black smoke regularly clouded the skies.
Nevertheless, Nineveh is still expected to produce 1.3 million tons of grain this year, which would help it regain its status as the country’s breadbasket.
In the town of Alam in Salahuddin, council chairman Jassem Khalaf has spent much of this year’s harvest consoling distraught locals who have lost a combined 250 hectares to fire.
On May 15, his entire 50 donums of land caught fire too, destroying an estimated 60 tons of wheat that would have earned him 40 million Iraqi dinars ($34,000).
“It went up in flames in a moment,” he said, standing in his scorched field of blackened crops holding a lone golden bushel.
Khalaf was adamant some of the fires were man-made and said they could have been caused by Daesh, or other groups.
“In the past we would hear of one field being burned once every few years. This year, the situation is out of the ordinary,” he said. “Maybe there is short-circuiting, but there are also culprits and hidden hands.”
Tale of many arsonists
While scorching temperatures and tinder-dry fields in Iraq lead to fires every year, local officials said there are far more than usual this season and they’re finding more evidence that blazes have been started deliberately.
Daesh has claimed responsibility for burning hundreds of hectares of farmland in Diyala, Kirkuk and Salahuddin provinces as well as Syria. But it was impossible to determine how many fires had been started by the militants.
The challenge for the government is even greater because some have taken advantage of fires sparked by militants to start their own — to settle scores or ethno-religious feuds, farmers said.
Some farmers accused Shiite militias of burning the land of Sunni farmers they believe supported Daesh during their reign. They also said some security forces were burning fields to flush out insurgents holed up in farms.
Reuters could not verify their accusations and neither the militias nor security forces were immediately reachable for comment.
Local officials said the kind of device discovered by Riyadh in his burnt fields in Diyala was an example of just one method being used to start fires this year.
Riyadh, who declined to give his full name for fear of reprisals, shared a photo of the device. Reuters could not independently verify the authenticity of the evidence.
Local officials said magnifying glasses have been found in many scorched fields in western Nineveh and south of Mosul. They said gunpowder had been placed under the lenses in the hope it would ignite under prolonged exposure to the sun.
“This gunpowder doesn’t go in one direction, it goes into several directions to spread into a wide fire,” said Nineveh’s agriculture chief Hekmat.
Explosive devices have also been planted to target fire trucks as they arrive to battle the flames. Two of the 53 fire engines serving Nineveh province have been hit, stretching already meagre resources, said Col. Hossam Khalil, chief of Nineveh’s civil defense unit.
“It is not enough, but we are working with what we have,” he told Reuters.
Silo risk
Hazem Jebbo, a farmer in the Christian town of Qaraqosh southeast of Mosul, knows the blaze that destroyed most of his crops was not started by Daesh. He blames the authorities for negligence.
Jebbo, 63 fled in 2014 when Daesh burnt down his 100 olive trees, used his chicken coop as a shooting range and dug tunnels beneath his house. He returned to pick up the pieces in 2017.  For two years nothing grew due to drought but then the rain came and his crops flourished.
But a bullet-riddled electricity pole in the middle of one field fell over on May 31 and the live wire sparked a fire. The district’s only fire truck arrived swiftly but its water pump failed and Jebbo lost 122 donums, the bulk of his crops. Forty other farmers lost land that day as the blaze spread.
Jebbo said he had begged the local authorities to fix the damaged pole for more than a year. They did — an hour after the fire had died down.
“Let them hear me carefully,” he said in tears in the charred remains of his farm. “Their negligence burned hundreds of donums, led to these losses.”
In Nineveh, agriculture chief Hekmat said grain silos were now his biggest concern, a worry shared by security experts.
“All our efforts are stored there. If something happens to these areas it will be a catastrophe,” he said.
Abdul Khalek Jassem, director of the Bazwaya silo in Nineveh, said they had stationed security forces at the entrance of the silo, which can hold up to 130,000 tons of wheat. The center has a single checkpoint manned by a Shabak paramilitary force affiliated to Iranian-backed Shiite militias.
Jassem reassured that all was under control, as thick black smoke rose from a new blaze in the fields beyond the silo. The emergency services took an hour to arrive and the fire had killed one person by the end of the day.


Iraq says to eliminate pollutant gas flaring by end of 2027

The sun sets behind burning gas flares at the Dora (Daura) Oil Refinery Complex in Baghdad on December 22, 2024. (AFP)
Updated 24 December 2024
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Iraq says to eliminate pollutant gas flaring by end of 2027

  • The office of Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani in a statement Monday evening pointed to “a rise in the level of eliminating gas flaring” in the country

BAGHDAD: Iraqi authorities on Monday announced that the energy-rich country would eliminate the polluting practice of gas flaring by the end of 2027, a statement from the prime minister’s office said.
Gas flaring during the production or processing of crude is intended to convert excess methane to carbon dioxide, but the process is often incomplete, resulting in further methane release.
Iraq has the third highest global rate of gas flaring, after Russia and Iran, having flared about 18 billion cubic meters of gas in 2023, according to the World Bank.
The office of Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani in a statement Monday evening pointed to “a rise in the level of eliminating gas flaring” in the country.
The office said that the current rate of elimination stood at 67 percent, with the aim of raising that rate to 80 percent by the end of 2025.
It added that the country aims to fully eliminate gas flaring by the end of 2027, compared to the previous administration’s target of 2030.
In 2017, Iraq joined a World Bank-led initiative aiming to end gas flaring globally by 2030.
Gas flaring is cheaper than capturing the associated gas, processing and marketing it.
In an April report, Greenpeace Middle East and North Africa said gas flaring “produces a number of cancer-linked pollutants including benzene.”
Iraq is considered by the United Nations to be one of the five countries most vulnerable to some impacts of climate change.
In recent years, it has suffered increasingly from droughts and further desertification, with the country gripped by dust storms much of the year.
 

 


Defense minister acknowledges Israel killed Hamas leader in Iran

Updated 24 December 2024
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Defense minister acknowledges Israel killed Hamas leader in Iran

  • The comments by Israel Katz appeared to mark the first time that Israel has admitted killing Ismail Haniyeh
  • Katz said the Houthis leadership would meet a similar fate to that of Haniyeh

JERUSALEM: Israel’s defense minister has confirmed that Israel assassinated Hamas’ top leader last summer and is threatening to take similar action against the leadership of the Houthi group in Yemen.
The comments by Israel Katz appeared to mark the first time that Israel has admitted killing Ismail Haniyeh, who died in an explosion in Iran in July.
Israel was widely believed to be behind the blast, and leaders have previously hinted at its involvement.
In a speech Monday, Katz said the Houthis would meet a similar fate as the other members of an Iranian-led alliance in the region, including Haniyeh.

He also noted that Israel has killed other leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, helped topple Syria’s Bashar Assad, and destroyed Iran’s anti-aircraft systems.
“We will strike (the Houthis’) strategic infrastructure and cut off the head of the leadership,” he said.
“Just like we did to Haniyeh, Sinwar, and Nasrallah in Tehran, Gaza, and Lebanon, we will do in Hodeida and Sanaa,” he said, referring to Hamas and Hezbollah leaders killed in previous Israeli attacks.
The Iranian-backed Houthis have launched scores of missiles and drones at Israel throughout the war, including a missile that landed in Tel Aviv on Saturday and wounded at least 16 people.
Israel has carried out three sets of airstrikes in Yemen during the war and vowed to step up the pressure on the militant group until the missile attacks stop.


New conflict in northeast Syria could bring ‘dramatic consequences’, UN envoy says

Geir Pedersen, UN Special envoy to Syria, talks to media before departing Damascus, Syria December 18, 2024. (REUTERS)
Updated 24 December 2024
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New conflict in northeast Syria could bring ‘dramatic consequences’, UN envoy says

  • Turkiye regards the YPG as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants who have fought an insurgency against the Turkish state and are deemed terrorists by Ankara, Washington and the European Union

BEIRUT: Tensions in northeast Syria between Kurdish-led authorities and Turkish-backed groups should be resolved politically or risk “dramatic consequences” for all of Syria, the United Nations envoy for the country Geir Pedersen told Reuters on Monday. Hostilities have escalated between Syrian rebels backed by Ankara and the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces in the northeast since Bashar Assad was toppled on Dec. 8.
Syrian armed groups seized the city of Manbij from the SDF on Dec. 9 and could be preparing to attack the key city of Kobani, or Ayn Al-Arab, on the northern border with Turkiye.
“If the situation in the northeast is not handled correctly, it could be a very bad omen for the whole of Syria,” Pedersen said by phone, adding that “if we fail here, it would have dramatic consequences when it comes to new displacement.” The SDF — which is spearheaded by the Kurdish YPG — has proposed to withdraw its forces from the area in exchange for a complete truce. But Turkiye’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, speaking alongside Syria’s de facto new leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa on Sunday in Damascus, said the YPG should disband totally.
Turkiye regards the YPG as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants who have fought an insurgency against the Turkish state and are deemed terrorists by Ankara, Washington and the European Union.
Pedersen said a political solution “would require serious, serious compromises” and should be part of the “transitional phase” led by Syria’s new authorities in Damascus. Fidan said he had discussed the YPG presence with the new Syrian administration and believed Damascus would take steps to ensure Syria’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday the country will remain in close dialogue with Sharaa. Kurdish groups have had autonomy across much of the northeast since Syria’s war began in 2011, but now fear it could be wiped out by the country’s new Islamist rule. Thousands of women rallied on Monday in a northeast city to condemn Turkiye and demand their rights be respected.
Pedersen said Sharaa had told him in meetings in Damascus last week that they were committed to “transitional arrangements that will be inclusive of all.”
But he said resolving tensions in the northeast would be a test for a new Syria after more than a half-century of Assad family rule.
“The whole question of creating a new, free Syria would be off to a very, extremely ... to put it diplomatically, difficult start,” he said.

 


Rights groups say evidence of Assad abuses must be protected

Updated 23 December 2024
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Rights groups say evidence of Assad abuses must be protected

  • The Saydnaya complex, the site of extrajudicial executions, torture and forced disappearances, epitomised the atrocities committed against Assad’s opponents

BEIRUT, Lebanon: Three rights group on Monday appealed to Syria’s new rulers to urgently preserve evidence of atrocities committed under former president Bashar Assad.
Such evidence — including government and intelligence documents as well as mass graves — will be essential for establishing the fate of tens of thousands of people forcibly disappeared, and for prosecuting those responsible for crimes under international law, the groups said.
“The transitional Syrian authorities should urgently take steps to secure and preserve evidence of atrocities committed under the government of former president Bashar Assad,” said Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons in Sednaya Prison (ADMSP).
The Saydnaya complex, the site of extrajudicial executions, torture and forced disappearances, epitomised the atrocities committed against Assad’s opponents.
“Every additional minute of inaction heightens the risk that a family may never discover the fate of their missing loved one, and an official responsible for horrific crimes may never be brought to justice,” Shadi Haroun, ADMSP program manager, said in a statement issued by Amnesty.
The statement said investigators from the three organizations visited detention facilities, mass graves and the military court after Islamist-led rebels toppled Assad on December 8.
“In all of the detention facilities visited, researchers observed that official documents were often left unprotected, with significant portions looted or destroyed,” the groups said.
They said they gathered testimony that security and intelligence personnel burned some material before they fled, but in other cases the armed groups who took control of the facilities, or newly-freed prisoners, also burned and looted material.
The researchers said they themselves saw ordinary people and some journalists “take some documents.”
“These documents may contain vital information,” the watchdogs said, calling on the new authorities to coordinate with fact-finding bodies created by the United Nations, “after urgently securing these locations and ensuring that the remaining evidence is not tampered with.”
The rights groups said they also underscored to Syria’s new authorities “the importance of securing the sites of the mass graves across the country,” having seen “local residents and families of the disappeared try to dig up some of the remains.”
They said officials from Syria’s new administration had promised the visiting researchers that they would “strengthen security around key facilities.”
On Sunday Robert Petit, the visiting head of a UN investigative body for Syria, said it was possible to find “more than enough” evidence to convict people of crimes under international law, but there was an immediate need to secure and preserve it.
 

 


Women rally for equal rights in Syria after Assad’s fall to Islamists

Updated 23 December 2024
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Women rally for equal rights in Syria after Assad’s fall to Islamists

  • Hostilities between the SDF and a Turkiye-backed Syrian force known as the Syrian National Army have escalated since Assad was ousted, with the SDF driven out of the northern city of Manbij

QAMISHLI, Syria: Thousands of women rallied in the northeastern Syrian city of Qamishli on Monday to demand the new Islamist rulers in Damascus respect women’s rights and to condemn Turkish-backed military campaigns in Kurdish-led regions of the north.
Many of the protesters waved the green flag of the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ), an affiliate of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units militia (YPG) that Turkiye deems a national security threat and wants disbanded immediately.
“We are demanding women’s rights from the new state ... and women must not be excluded from rights in this system,” said Sawsan Hussein, a women’s rights activist.
“We are (also) condemning the attacks of the Turkish occupation against the city of Kobani.”
Kurdish groups have enjoyed autonomy across much of the north since Syria’s civil war began in 2011. The Kurdish YPG militia, which leads the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) armed group, is a major force in the area.
But Syria’s power balance has shifted away from these groups since the Islamist Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham group (HTS) swept into Damascus and toppled Bashar Assad two weeks ago, establishing a new administration friendly to Ankara.
Syria’s dominant Kurdish groups embrace an ideology emphasising socialism and feminism — in contrast to the conservative Sunni Islamist views of HTS, a former Al-Qaeda affiliate.
Turkiye views the YPG as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been waging an insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984 and is deemed a terrorist group by Turkiye, the United States and the European Union.
Hostilities between the SDF and a Turkiye-backed Syrian force known as the Syrian National Army have escalated since Assad was ousted, with the SDF driven out of the northern city of Manbij.
Syrian Kurdish leaders have warned that Turkish forces are mobilizing for an offensive on the SDF-controlled city of Kobani at the Turkish border, also known as Ayn Al-Arab.
There is widespread apprehension among Syrians that the new Damascus administration will gravitate toward hard-line Islamist rule, marginalizing minorities and women from public life.
Obaida Arnout, a spokesperson for the Syrian transitional government, said last week that women’s “biological and physiological nature” rendered them unfit for certain governmental jobs.
Hemrin Ali, an official in the Kurdish-led administration of northeastern Syria, told Reuters at Monday’s rally: “Yes to supporting the YPJ. Yes to preserving the rights and gains of the women’s revolution in northern and eastern Syria.”