The Iraq War devastate people’s life in Basrah. But today the city is rebuilding fast.
“Basrah is the Iraq’s Venice” journalist Colin Freeman wrote quoting businessman Abdulmuttalib Kadhom. This optimistic statement shows how dynamic the city of Basrah is nowadays. Only a couple of month after the Iraq War ended, the city of Basrah started to reconstruct at an astonishing pace. Although some of the heaviest fighting took place in this city during the War, Basrah is no longer a battlefield. It is a booming city which reconstruction is at work almost everywhere.
Providing bare necessities
After bombings, Basrah almost restarts from scratch but it does have an uncommon appetite for investment and building projects. In May 2013 for instance, the province of Basrah announced 1,992 residential housing units would be erected near the Muhammad al-Qasim bridge. The project was entitled “Golden City” and will be carried out by a company from Honk Kong.
On top of a mosque, a power station, a police station and a supermarket, Golden City will also include “all service buildings, schools, kindergartens, medical clinics and municipal administration” Governor of Basra, Khalaf Abdul Samad said. It appeared that water management infrastructure had to be renovated as well. In 2009, an international workshop made an inventory of “water ressources and their effect on the percentage of salt in it in Basra”, member of the workshop Mouhsen Abdulhai explained.
“The workshop aims at […] using modern technology in the field of purification and desalination”, Mouhsen Abdulhain said back then. Since 2009, these first experiments have become genuine public projects. A desalinization plant is going to be built near the city and will produce 200,000 cube meters of drinkable water per day for people to use. World leader in water treatement Veolia Water was picked up as well as Japanese industrial firm Hitachi and Egyptian civil engineering company ArabCo to carry out that $270 million project.
The filtration unit will comprise top-notch filtration processes, like Veolia’s reverse osmosis desalinization process, as well as an autonomous power generator to ensure an ongoing water supply. “Water supply is limited in Iraq and Basrah desalinization plant will ease the region development by making this resource more available” Veolia Water Solutions & Technologies’ sales manager Patrick Couzinet said. Besides, the complex might be expanded in a near future to meet the need of oil industry for supplementary water resources.
Reviving the economy
Rebuilding what was destroyed during the war and providing people with the bare necessities is a priority of course. But new infrastructure is also a key support to the economy too. Basrah is home of the massive “Iraq Energy City” oil field but miss power supply to operate it.
British firm Aggreko was therefore designated to build a 6 MW power plants and supply the oil field with an increasing amount of power.The facility will deliver energy over a 200, 000 square meters area and to “1,000 people who live and work within Iraq Energy City”, the oil field’s website read.
Basrah’s development seems to be unstoppable today. In November 2013, the city even completed its sports stadium, called Sports City. Seven FG Wilson generators were set up by Horizons Engineering, bringing light to a complex that cost $800 million. All in all, these generators will deliver energy to a 558 acre stadium comprising several hotels and restaurants on the top of brand new sport facilities.
Basrah Sports City is “one of the most significant construction projects Iraq has seen in recent years” Eng Maad Al Zubaidy of Anwar Soura General Contracting said. That Basrah is able to invest so much into leisure facilities only a couple of years after the war stopped surely illustrates how fast reconstruction is going is the South of Iraq.
The last ten years were troubled times for Iraq. But Basrah’s dynamism definitely show how hurry this city is to make a clean break with the recent past.
