Millions of people living in western Baghdad are without running water Sunday after a Saturday ISIS attack on an electricity pylon in the north. The pylon was running an important pumping station.
Attacks on Iraq’s electricity system have been common this summer, with a lot of important pylons being destroyed. Usually such attacks are blamed on unspecified militants, though in this case they are attributing it directly to ISIS.
Power shortages and common, and intermittent water cuts mean many Baghdad residents have water tanks to cover brief outages. This looks to be a longer outage, and locals are advised to ration their supplies.
Iraq produces far less electricity than it uses, particularly in a hot summer. Even then, the electricity sector is heavily dependent on imports of gas from neighboring Iran, and Iraq is running a deep debt on that account which they are mostly not paying for.
And on whose payroll is this “ISIS”? As the main reason for keeping US troops in Iraq is presumably ISIS — ISIS we will have.
All that it does is increases the animosity towards US. Population by now attributes all ills to the fact that US forces are there, inviting trouble. Most ordinary people believe that normalcy would not return until US troops leave.
They are hoping Baghdad airport will be commandeered in the near future.
It’s a bad situation for the Iraqis. ISIS remains a justification for US presence and not much attention is paid to the fact that the US holds all of Iraq’s funds from selling its oil. Good luck collecting the money. https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-warns-iraq-it-risks-losing-access-to-key-bank-account-if-troops-told-to-leave-11578759629