You wake up in the morning to find your nostrils clogged. Houses and trees have vanished beneath a choking brown smog. A hot wind blasts fine particles through doors and windows, coating everything in sight and imparting an eerie orange glow.
Dust storms are a routine experience in Iraq, but lately they've become a whole lot more common."Now it seems we have dust storms nearly every day," said Raed Hussein, 31, an antiques dealer who had to rush his 5-year-old son to a hospital during a recent squall because the boy couldn't breathe. "We suffer from lack of electricity, we suffer from explosions, and now we are suffering even more because of this terrible dust.
This summer and last have seen more than twice as many dusty days as the previous four, he said. And 35% of the time, dust is reducing visibility to less than three miles, the point at which it is normally considered unsafe to fly. On many of those days, visibility was zero, delaying flights, disrupting military operations and sending thousands of people to hospitals with breathing problems.
"The lack of available water is a huge issue and it's having a huge effect on Iraqi society," said Silverman, social science advisor for strategic communications with the Army's Human Terrain System, a program that links social scientists and anthropologists with combat brigades. He emphasized that he was not speaking on behalf of the military.
It's a dramatic turnaround for the country where agriculture reputedly was born thousands of years ago. Iraq's ancient name, Mesopotamia, means "Land Between the Rivers," and though about half the country traditionally has been desert, the fertile plains watered by the mighty Tigris and Euphrates rivers once provided food for much of the Middle East.
Now the Agriculture Ministry estimates that 90% of the land is either desert or suffering from severe desertification, and that the remaining arable land is being eroded at the rate of 5% a year, said Fadhil Faraji, director-general of the ministry's Department for Combating Desertification.
"Severe desertification is like cancer in a human being," he said. "When the land loses its vegetation cover, it's very hard to get it back. You have to deal with it meter by meter."
It's difficult to know where to begin to untangle the complex web of factors that have conspired to push Iraq to this point. But officials say human error is primarily to blame.Turkey and Syria, which control the headwaters of the Euphrates, have curtailed the river's flow by half to deal with their own drought-related problems, said Awn Abdullah, head of the National Center for Water Resources Management.
Water has been diverted from the Tigris to keep the Euphrates flowing, causing problems for communities along that river. Iran, too, has been building dams on tributaries of rivers that reach into Iraq, drying out riverbeds in the east of the country.The effects extend far beyond the immediate inconveniences of dust storms. Drinking water is scarce in many areas of the south as seawater leaches into the depleted rivers. The fabled marshes of southern Iraq, drained by Saddam Hussein and then re-flooded after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, are drying up, and the traditional Marsh Arabs who depend on them for their livelihood are being forced to leave again.
In the cities, rural migrants compete with the urban poor for scarce jobs and resources, and in desperation some turn to crime or insurgency.
And then there are the dust storms, which bring the crisis of the countryside directly into the living rooms of city dwellers. The falling dust has the consistency of talcum powder, and it finds its way into cupboards and corners as well as nostrils and lungs."It causes health problems, it disrupts business, it destroys machinery, not to mention the psychological effects," said Ibrahim Jawad Sherif, who is in charge of soil monitoring at the Environment Ministry. "It's a catastrophe that's affecting every aspect of Iraqi life."
The other day, I had gotten back from a beautiful, albeit short night flight. I went inside a building and sat down at my desk, once again, relegating myself to the grind of the daily job. I had just sat down when I heard someone next to me ask, "Hey, how's the weather?"
"Gorgeous", I replied, referring to the "clear-blue-and-twenty-two" weather I had just flown in, not an hour prior.
"Are you joking?" he asked.
"Oh no, you couldn't have asked for better weather".
The other officer looked at me incredulously, "Just take a look around the room"
The room—buried deep within the innards of a building--had that hazy, smoky look to it that so often happens when dust storms permeate the air of Iraq.
"What the hell?"
Unbeknownst to me, we'd just experienced a "haboob", one of the massive sandstorms that occasionally hits deserts throughout the Sahara and the Middle East, often arising out of nowhere. These sandstorms looked for all the world like a scene from the movie, "The Mummy", in which a massive cloud of sand threatens to envelop a small biplane. They were violent, they were sudden, and they made for a great picture. Of all the times to forget my camera.
(Photo courtesy Wikipedia)
Last year, it took a 150-man police escort to get Sayed Jawad Bahoner, the new subgovernor of this district, safely into Jalrez town to assume his post. He slept on the floor of his office building and rarely ventured more than 100 yards outside for fear of the insurgents who ruled the streets.
That was before February, when a company of American infantrymen dropped into town from helicopters and set up outposts along the Jalrez Valley. Mr. Bahoner feels so safe that in April, he summoned his wife and three children from their hideaway in Kabul and moved them into a house in town...
...U.S. officers here believe the surge forces will provide enough troops to pursue aggressive counterinsurgency tactics in the country's most volatile areas. That means not only clearing contested villages and valleys, but also leaving troops in place to keep insurgents at bay. Previously, U.S. troops left swaths of the country untouched and would fight their way in to others, but couldn't stay long enough to prevent the Taliban and other insurgent groups from returning.
The goal is to buy time for the Afghan government to provide safety and services to the locals, solidifying its legitimacy. "The surge in Iraq created space to develop the Iraqi security forces," said Col. Haight. "It's the same thing here."...
...In February, the 180 men of the battalion's Alpha Company jumped out of hovering helicopters into thigh-deep snow near Mr. Bahoner's district building. They pressed east through the valley, eventually setting up three permanent outposts.
They met virtually no resistance. Since the soldiers arrived, insurgents have twice fired rockets and once taken potshots at them. The troops have encountered just two roadside bombs.
"It's such a shock to see so many U.S. troops here that whatever plans [the insurgents] had are on hold," says Capt. Matthew Thom, a 31-year-old from Beaverton, Ore., and Alpha Company's commander at the time of the air assault.
The outposts are rudimentary. The troops eat either packaged meals or heated trays of school-cafeteria-style dishes. Most days are quiet: Soldiers chat on foot with the locals or drive from village to village in Humvees and armored vehicles.
Taking advantage of the calm, construction crews funded by the Italian government are preparing to pave the valley's pitted dirt road. Afghan and U.S. officials hope this will allow locals to more easily send apples to market in Kabul or Pakistan, and remind them that their interests lie with the government.
