Answer:
For almost 30 years, including during the period of occupation by the US- and UK-led Coalition Provisional Authority, Iraqi authorities have failed to properly manage and regulate Iraq’s water resources, depriving the people in Iraq’s southern Basra governorate—a population of roughly 4 million—of their right to safe drinking water. Basra’s primary water sources are the Shatt al-Arab river and its freshwater canals. But multiple government failures since the 1980s, including poor management of upstream sources, inadequate regulation of pollution and sewage, and chronic neglect and mismanagement of water infrastructure, have caused the quality of these waterways to deteriorate.
While the degradation of Basra’s water sources has been a persistent problem for decades, it became a full-blown crisis in the summer of 2018, when at least 118,000 people were hospitalized due to symptoms doctors identified as related to water quality. In August, hundreds of people began pouring into Basra’s hospitals suffering from rashes, abdominal pain, vomiting, and diarrhea, overwhelming their staff and available stocks of medicine. By August 16, the Basra Health Directorate identified water contamination as a likely cause, and its director, Riyad Abd al-Amir, called on people to boil all water before drinking or cooking with it.
Trash build up in Basra's river
The following week, the Iraqi Ministry of Health denied the existence of a serious epidemic of cholera or other diseases due to water contamination in Basra governorate, even as hundreds of people continued to be hospitalized each day. On August 26, hundreds of residents stormed the Basra Health Directorate to protest the poor health services provided to those who had fallen ill. On September 29, the head of the office of the Independent High Commission for Human Rights in Basra, Mehdi Al-Tamimi, stated that the number of cases had reached 100,000, with heath authorities registering at least 118,000 cases by November 2018. While expertsexpertsexperts disagree on the exact cause of the illness, they all agreeagree that it was related to poor water quality.
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