ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Poverty-stricken Iraqis in a Baghdad slum are demanding essentials from authorities, slamming declining services and frequent electricity outages.
Piles of waste and contaminated water have become a daily reality in the al-Shaab slums north of Baghdad.
Residents of the slums mostly make a living out of hard labor or collecting metals from landfills to provide for their families. They say they want job opportunities, as well as environmental and health protections.
"We do not have water all the time, and sometimes we ask for water from the neighbors... taking some from their tanks to store it and use it for air coolers at least," Abdulridha Kadhim, a local who lives in the slums, told Rudaw's Anmar Ghazi over the weekend. "Life is very difficult, especially when it rains in the winter, the situation gets worse."
Several residential apartments have been built around the slums, but the destitute people of the area say nothing has changed for them.
"The area is as it is, nothing has changed since it was empty spaces with no buildings, but people came and built buildings...," Mohammed Rahim, who works as a laborer and lives in the slums said.
"We are talking about approximately 4,000 random settlements spread across all provinces of Iraq, and Baghdad occupies first place with 1,073 random settlements, followed by Basra province with more than 700 random settlements, and then the rest of the governorates in varying numbers," Abdul Zahra Al-Hindawi - spokesman for the Iraqi Ministry of Planning, told Rudaw.
"More than 3.5 million people live within these slums," Hindawi said.
In the slums, diseases are rampant among the residents due to the accumulation of garbage on the streets.
Iraq's poverty rate stood at about 20 percent before the coronavirus pandemic, but the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warned in 2020 that an additional 11.7 percent of Iraqis were at risk of falling below the poverty line because of further economic hardship caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
Iraq has not had a population census since 1997 due to political and economic factors.
Anmar Ghazi contributed to this report.
