“Electricity output has dipped to its lowest point in three years in Iraq, where the desert sun is rising toward another broiling summer and US engineers are winding down their rebuilding of the crippled power grid”, Associated Press reported on March 25. It reported that despite US$4 billion having been paid out to US engineering contractors to refurbish Iraq’s electricity network, output in February had dropped to 3750 megawatts a day. Prior to the US-led invasion in March 2003, Iraq’s sanction-crippled electricity output averaged around 4500 megawatts. Since then most residents of Baghdad, a city of 7 million people, have received less than eight hours of electricity a day. In February, they received 3-5 hours. “We’re living miserably”, Baghdad housewife Suad Hassan, a mother of four, told AP. Her family usually goes without hot water and machine washing, she said, and “often my children have to do their homework in the dim light of oil lamps”.

From Green Left Weekly, April 5, 2006.
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