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BAGHDAD — Extreme heat is paralyzing Iraq, forcing shutdowns on the overstretched power grid as authorities extend public holidays to protect workers from 125-degree temperatures.
Iraq ranks fifth on the list of countries most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and is warming faster than much of the world. Almost 20 years after the US-led invasion of Iraq, the country is unprepared to deal with the tensions.
In the southern provinces of Basra, Dhi Qar and Maysan, authorities said on Saturday that the power grid had lost power for a second night in a row, plunging millions of homes into darkness during the sweltering night. Spoiled food in refrigerators. Parents put their children in the car and drive for hours – the air conditioning in their vehicles is the only way they can stay cool.
By Sunday morning, the governor of Dhi Qar province, one of Iraq’s poorest, said a public holiday for civil servants would be extended until the start of the Muharram religious festival on Tuesday “due to the noticeable rise in temperatures”.
Ten months after populist cleric Moqtada al-Sadr won the most seats in parliamentary elections here, politicians from the country’s Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish blocs are fighting bitterly over the shape of the new government. As a result, no budget was adopted and major spending decisions were postponed.
But with forecasts showing that most Iraqi provinces are likely to witness temperatures of around 120 degrees or higher this week, the electricity grid is not the only public service that is faltering.
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Agriculture and fishing, two key pillars of the country’s efforts to move away from dependence on oil revenue, have been decimated by the drought. Overburdened hospitals are treating cases of heatstroke or breathing difficulties likely worsened by toxic fumes in the air, doctors say.
On the streets of Baghdad on Sunday, young boys threw water from iceboxes, shielding their faces from the sun with sweat-soaked scarves. Veterans of the traffic police said that their job is becoming more and more difficult. “I’ve been doing this for 16 years,” said Falah Nouri, 37, as he rested on a battered sidewalk by the Tigris River. “It’s not just the sun. It’s the fumes and how the concrete heats up under our feet.
He said his soles were burnt and so he was wearing shoes recommended by the doctor. “He wants me to take a break, but how do I take a break? We have to work,” said the policeman irritated.
At noon, in many neighborhoods, one noise was missing from the usual din: the noise of construction. Although day laborers often keep Baghdad’s construction boom going in the summer, this time it was just too hot. On the normally green Abu Nawas Street, a construction worker looked deranged from the heat as he slumped against a withered tree. There was no shadow to be seen.
As government power systems fail in Iraq, sites ranging from government ministries to family homes rely on private backup generators and an army of operators who work in hot, dark trailers around the clock to keep them going.
But they carry their risks. Powered by diesel fuel, they spew toxic fumes into the air, experts say, and customers are forced to pay exorbitant electricity prices to the irresponsible and often corrupt businessmen who own the machines.
In Baghdad’s southeastern Zafrania neighborhood, 49-year-old Habib Abdul Khadim could barely make his voice heard over the shuddering roar of his generator. “We’re melting here!” he cried. “I and 40 million other Iraqis are melting.”
The heat was oppressive in his small office and he said the fumes seemed to create a kind of film on his eyes.
All around the neighborhood was suffering. On the wall of his office, the lists of families now in debt for their electricity supply grow longer. At his home, his newborn grandson Adam was crying as he struggled to breathe.
“Every year we think it can’t get any worse, but then summer surprises us,” Abdul Hadim said. He looked exhausted.
During the summer months, Baghdad’s heat only subsides when a dust storm rolls in, blanketing the city with particles of sand and dirt loosened by the wind as Baghdad’s green belt dries up. This summer, thousands of people were hospitalized with breathing problems as a result. Doctors can’t do much.
“We just give them hydrocortisone and some time away from the storm,” Saif Ali said recently, the beds in his emergency room still sandy from his patients’ feet. “It’s getting worse every year, though.”
The combination of increasing heat and water shortages in Iraq caused by climate change, poor governance and reduced upstream flows caused trouble in the past. In the south, conditions are forcing families off their farmlands and into cities, where tensions with longtime residents are rising amid dwindling resources.
In the city of Basra, where residents braced Sunday for another night without electricity, pollution and toxic waste contaminated the city’s entire water supply in 2018, causing more than 100,000 people to be hospitalized with abdominal pain, vomiting and diarrhea.
Large protests followed, but the authorities crushed them with lethal force.
Small demonstrations are held across Iraq every week, denouncing poor services in the face of extreme heat. In the swampy areas of Iraq – some of which are now cracked beds of earth in place of the silvery pools where the Garden of Eden is said to have been – a protest sign last month expressed the misery.
“If you ask me about the state of my land, I will tell you,” it read. “Drought, poverty, forced migration, violence.”
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