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Last week, Iraqi security forces arrested two people in the Euphrates agricultural town of Mishkhab after a protest over water shortages and the lack of public services.

The authorities immediately charged them with belonging to Saddam Husseins former ruling Baath Party and attempts to glorify the notorious dictator.

The reason behind the detention was the slogans the protesters shouted, which praised the former tyrants rule and showed resentment towards his successors who have given them little of what they had hoped for in post-Saddam Iraq.

The Mishkhab incident may not signal the phenomenon of nostalgia for the Saddam era in Iraq, even though many Iraqis still believe their country was better under a dictator renowned for his brutal repression, but it underscores how its traumatic past is still haunting Iraq and dividing the nation.

This haunting question came to mind last week when a senior UN diplomat mandated to help Iraq rebuild, urged Iraqis to ignore the horror and the deaths in their recent history caused by the Islamic State (IS) group and suggested that they should suppress the trauma they had sustained.

On 8 June, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Iraq Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert urged the Iraqi authorities to repatriate thousands of IS-linked nationals detained in a camp in northeastern Syria, declaring that the best and only durable solution is to control the situation, managing returns swiftly and decisively, in the spirit of partnership, to prevent the legacy of yesterdays fight from fuelling tomorrows conflict.

Keeping people in restricted and poor conditions ultimately creates greater protection and security risks than taking them back in a controlled manner. Iraq is demonstrating that responsible repatriations are possible by finding dignified solutions anchored in the principles of both accountability and reintegration, Plasschaert said in a statement released by her office.

She made her remarks after a tour with a UN delegation to the Al-Hol Camp designed to highlight a so-called UN-led support rehabilitation initiative to repatriate IS detainees in northeastern Syria. She was accompanied by the chief of Iraqs National Security Service.

The camp, a sprawling complex of tents that has hosted tens of thousands of people suspected of having links with IS for many years, is under the control of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a Kurdish-led group which rules over much of northeastern Syria.

Plasschaerts public appeal echoes the quiet diplomacy pursued by many Western stakeholders, which have been privately urging Iraqi government leaders to support the return of Iraqi families from the Al-Hol Camp.

The Western media have also been playing up the dire conditions in the camp, though some of it has blamed their governments for the plight of the families.

Iraq has said it is determined to repatriate all the families stuck in the Syrian camp after security checks are completed. It has also urged the international community to help it set up re-integration programmes for the returnees.

The Al-Hol Camp, where about 57,000 people, almost half of them children, live, is considered one of the most violent detention and displacement camps on earth. It has been branded a breeding ground for terrorism.

Since March 2019, there have been at least 130 murders in the main Al-Hol Camp, home to Syrian and Iraqi men, women, and children associated with IS. But the Al-Hol Annex, which houses displaced women and children from the Syrian Civil War, has also been insecure.

The already precarious humanitarian and security conditions have deteriorated further in recent months, making the risks associated with this slow-moving catastrophe ever clearer. A camp like Al-Hol fuels resentment and inspires terrorists to commit everything from breakout operations to large-scale attacks.

In October 2020, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) announced plans to release all the Syrian nationals from the camp, which account for about half of the population.

That process has been hampered by significant obstacles in areas outside of government control, however, while the regime led by Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad remains uninterested in their repatriation.

After the release of the Syrian nationals, there would still remain some 10,000 people from other nationalities in the camp from 40 other countries. There have been repeated calls from Iraqi officials asking the international community to repatriate its nationals from Al-Hol, but only a few countries have responded positively to the calls citing security concerns.

The UN is concentrating its efforts on over 25,000 Iraqis whom it wants Iraq to take back despite the fears of the Baghdad authorities, the Kurdistan Regional Government, and the general Iraqi public that the returnees could be a time bomb.

So far, over 2,500 Iraqis have been repatriated to Iraq. But as the UN and some Western governments are increasing the pressure on the Iraqi authorities to take back more, leaving them in a quandary as they realise the country is not ready to provide the required post-return security and accommodation.

Five years after the conflict in Iraq ended, many of the physical, emotional, and psychological wounds of the war remain unhealed. The end of the conflict was nevertheless presented as the beginning of a new era of peace, national healing, and reconstruction in Iraq and the closure of ISs bloody chapter.

For many people in parts of the country where the worst IS atrocities were experienced, there can be no reconciliation when so many scars of the war remain. On Saturday, Iraq marked the eighth anniversary of the IS massacre of 1,700 Iraqi soldiers during its 2015 blitzkrieg, with many of the bodies still unaccounted for.

On 8 June, an official in the Iraqi Anbar Province told the local media that the security forces in the province expect trouble next week when some 500 families of IS affiliates are due to arrive from Al-Hol.

He said that many local people have vowed to take revenge on the returnees, who are accused of committing atrocities after the group captured the province in 2015.

Local people in Mosul have also protested against the authorities giving accommodation to some 100 families returning from Al-Hol in the Al-Jadda Camp in the south of the province. Some of the women in the camp have acknowledged links to IS through relatives, but others have denied having had anything to do with the terrorist group.

Nearly three and a half years after the IS caliphate in Iraq was declared defeated, reports abound that the terror group is mounting raids in many parts of northern and central Iraq. IS militants have been carrying out daily hit-and-run attacks, killing soldiers, members of the Popular Mobilisation Force (PMF), and civilians.

On 20 January, IS-affiliated militants attacked a prison near the city of Al-Hassakeh in northeastern Syria in the hope of freeing their jailed comrades, leaving hundreds dead on both sides.

The brazen attack was the latest evidence of ISs resurgence and sent a message to the Iraqi authorities that the group has significant military capacities and remains defiant about making a comeback.

The hasty rehabilitation of IS militants in Iraq also bodes ill for many countries in the Middle East that are engaged in their own wars against IS branches. Al-Hol serves as a key hub for the regions violent extremists and terror networks, and many countries will feel threatened if their nationals in the camp are let go.

Moreover, Plasschaerts suggestion will certainly undermine strategies adopted by many governments in the region to counter the radical hate-fuelled ideology of IS that is considered conducive to the production of extremism and terrorism.

But rather than taking responsibility for the failure to address this overwhelming challenge, the top UN official in Iraq has resorted to the standard tactic of running away from the problem and blaming it on the weakest link in the global war on terrorism.

Media reports about the dire conditions in the Al-Hol Camp and its being a tinderbox for terrorism have served as a call to action, but the international community has not decisively answered calls to tackle the crisis involving facilities holding IS detainees, including foreign nationals.

Aside from the Iraqi children, there are over 7,300 minors from 60 countries across the globe living in the Al-Hol Camp, according to Save the Children, an international NGO, but its repeated appeals to these childrens governments to urgently step up efforts to repatriate them along with their families have fallen on deaf ears.

Instead of giving room to apologists for those governments that refuse to repatriate their IS-linked nationals or actors who want to exploit opportunities afforded by their inaction, the UN chief diplomat in Iraq should work for much-needed international efforts to address this global challenge collectively.

A version of this article appears in print in the 16 June, 2022 edition ofAl-Ahram Weekly.

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What the UN wants: Iraq's new dilemma - World - Al-Ahram Weekly - Ahram Online

New excavations of the ancient complex of Girsu in Iraq, led by the British Museum, have the potential to rewrite accepted histories of the development in Mesopotamia, according to archaeologist Sebastien Rey, after findings from the project have come to light.

For decades, historians have believed that the Sumerians' mastery of irrigation or the ability to have regular and stable access to water moved them from subsistence towards the extraordinary feats they are known for: writing, temple complexes, grouping into cities.

Now, the Girsu Project's discoveries suggest that irrigation was not the cause of these changes after all. But the question remains: what was it?

Rey, who is curator of Ancient Mesopotamia at the British Museum, was the lead archaeologist on the project. Girsu, or present-day Tello in southern Iraq, is a city and temple complex erected by the Sumerians in about 3000 to 2000 BC. A paper on the subject will be published later this year, and the British Museum has mounted the exhibition Ancient Iraq: New Discoveries, in Nottingham in the UK, to recontextualise existing artefacts from their collection that come from Girsu and other Sumerian cities.

Members of the archaeological team at Girsu, southern Iraq, in autumn 2021. Photo: British Museum

Rey and his team used new technologies to understand the development of the city, flying drones over the vast, 250-hectare site. The images they gathered show the extent to which the irrigation system was embedded throughout the city and its surrounds.

Heavy rainfall, a product of climate change, also washed away the top layer of the soil, making the outlines even more apparent.

Working with archaeologists from five universities in Iraq, led by Jaafar Jotheri of Al Qadisiyah, the British Museum team dug out shells and other material from the bottom level of the canals to be carbon-dated. The results were startling: the canals seem to have been dug in the fifth century BC. .

The big surprise is that the largest irrigation canals date to the prehistory of Mesopotamia. That means they are much, much older than the birth of the city, by about 1,000 years," says Rey. "Traditionally, what you read is that development in Mesopotamia begins at the end of the fourth millennium, around 3300 BC. Thats when there was an important transition from pre-urban to urban and the invention of writing.

"But the canals that we have dated recently sets the date back to the fifth millennium, which means that irrigation is not the key, the spark that triggered the urban construction and the invention of writing. And that's a really important discovery.

Before, archeologists believed that once the ancient Sumerians learnt to irrigate their crops, they were able to move from subsistence farming to the social and religious hierarchy that the elaborate temples of Girsu attest to.

But the Girsu Projects discoveries, which Rey has written up for a paper that has passed peer review but which is still to be published, show that the Sumerians were living with well-watered plains for a full millennium before they began to build the temple complexes.

What changed? What moved the needle towards a more complex society?

Rey speculates that the shift was unrelated to the environment but rather owed to the pattern of thinking of those living in Girsu: an ideological transformation. Temples and administrative buildings allowed the powers ascribed to the gods to reside in one site, which was embedded into a larger social and political structure.

It was a domestication of the power of the gods, Rey says, in an adaptation of the phrase usually used for Sumerian development of the domestication of water.

A statue of King Gudea found in Girsu, dating from c. 2130 BC. The statue and other items from Iraq are currently on show as part of Ancient Iraq: New Discoveries in Nottingham in the UK. Photo: The Trustees of the British Museum

The last time Girsu was excavated was in the 1960s, when now-standard technologies and archaeological practices were not in place. Sumerian scholars have been working off that eras imperfect knowledge since then, as the US invasion in the 1990s and the ensuing unrest forestalled any archaeological excavation of the site.

In addition, particularly since the 2000s, Girsu had been badly looted. Cones, statues and other votive objects can be found on the black market across the world. In 2018, for instance, the British Museum returned symbolic cones that were used in the Sumerian temple of Girsu. They had been found as part of a raid on a London antiquities dealer.

When the archaeological team arrived last year, they found Girsu pockmarked, with depressions in the soil where looters dug up items. The looting has given the excavation team an added responsibility. Their goal was both to research the site but also to practice what Rey calls forensic archeology, treating the dig like a crime scene.

Archaeologists and workers excavate the ancient Sumerian city of Girsu, known as Tello. AFP

We are trying to rescue the site from looting but also from late 19th century and early 20th-century excavations, he explains. And we are using Girsu as a case study to teach, and to learn also for ourselves, a method that will help the Iraqis restore their heritage first of all.

By re-excavating the robber holes, you can find evidence of what the looters left behind a trail you can work on for provenance, so that when Border Force in the UK contacts us and says we found these objects in a suitcase in Heathrow, we will have a data set to know which objects came from Girsu.

Looters tend to take unbroken objects, which fetch the highest amount on the market. These undamaged artefacts account for roughly a 10th of all the cones, votive sculptures and artefacts that have lain in the ground for thousands of years.

By scrutinising the Sumerian inscriptions on the cones that have been left behind, however, archaeologists can make connections to those that have been taken, even if they are not fragments of the same object.

Mesopotamian clay cones bearing cuneiform inscriptions are displayed during a handover ceremony of a trove of looted Iraqi antiquities returned by the US in August 2021 at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Baghdad. Cones such as these were extensively looted from Girsu and other sites following the 2003 US invasion. AFP

The Girsu Project also had another goal: training and mentorship. Working in partnership with Iraqs State Board of Antiquities and Heritage and five partner universities in Iraq Mosul, Hillah, Al Qadisiyah, Al Simawa, and Dhi Qar the project aims to train Iraqi archeologists and conservators and teach them the principles of surveying techniques, excavating artefacts and processing finds.

The two-year scheme, funded by a grant from the Getty, follows on from the British Museums previous Iraq Scheme, which likewise emphasised training. The five-year project, funded by the UK government, took place from 2016 to 2021, with an extra year because of Covid delays.

This aspect of the project is key, because in many ways little has changed in the archaeological landscape since the first age of European excavation, which began under colonialism in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Most of Iraq's archaeological digs are still organised by Western countries, funded by Western countries, and then the information disseminated in Western journals rarely, if ever, being translated into Arabic for the local Iraqi population to learn about the discoveries made on their watch.

Even the terms of archaeology discovery, development and an emphasis on an object-based culture are embedded in a European system of thought, as extensive academic work in the field of decolonising archeology has demonstrated.

Within this context, one of the most laudable elements of the Girsu Project is its ethical standards.

Jotheri, an eminent professor of geoarchaeology at Al Qasidiyah University who worked on the Girsu Project, highlights the importance of mentorship for Iraqi archeology. At Girsu, newly uncovered objects such as votive sculptures, figurines and carved cylinder seals, were conserved as they were being excavated, which gives trainee Iraqi archaeologists a chance to study the objects, rather than a situation where the knowledge gained from the site flows to European laboratories and archeologists. The objects were then given to the Iraq Museum in Baghdad.

Young Iraqi archaeologists received training as part of the Girsu Project, headed by Sebastien Rey of the British Museum, centre front. Photo: British Museum

We have two sides: we have the internationals and we have the Iraqis, says Jotheri. From the Iraqi side, the archeologists require equipment, laptops, the training, accommodation and houses, and salaries. Unlike others, the Girsu Project actually engaged more Iraq universities, the local community. They did lots of workshops and attended conferences. They provided counterparts to the experts from the British side.

However, Jotheri says, this is not the norm. In fact, for Iraq, where the State Board of Antiquities rarely enforces equal partnerships, there remains a two-tier situation for archaeology.

From the international side, typically, they want everything, he says. Its like colonialist times, they need Iraqi silence. We are their cheap slaves with no voice. They take everything. They treat the archeological site as an oil field. An oil field when the barrel is cheap.

The Girsu Project might be making groundbreaking discoveries about the development of civilisation in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago. But the project, and the Iraq Scheme before it, also shed light on the present, and are a reminder that some of the historical practices of archaeology might not be as far in the past as one might think.

Ancient Iraq: New Discoveries is on show at the Djanogly Gallery, Lakeside Arts, Nottingham, UK, until June 19. The exhibition recontextualises older works from the British Museum collection in the light of the Girsu Project's new findings.

A view inside Thi Qar museum

Updated: June 14, 2022, 3:47 AM

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New discoveries in Iraq upend story of Mesopotamia - The National

BAGHDAD: Iraq temporarily closed Baghdad airport on Monday as choking clouds of dust blanketed the capital, the latest crippling sandstorm in a country that has warned climate change poses an existential threat.

It was the tenth such storm since mid-April to hit Iraq, which has been battered by intense droughts, soil degradation, high temperatures and low rainfall linked to climate change.

Earlier this month, to mark World Environment Day, President Barham Saleh warned that tackling climate change must become a national priority for Iraq as it is an existential threat to the future of our generations to come.

The sun eventually reappeared on Monday afternoon, after a thick white dust had covered Baghdad and surrounding areas through the morning, with visibility slashed to a few hundred metres (yards).

Officials at Baghdad airport announced the temporary suspension of flights, before they were restarted at around 10:30am. In Najaf, the airport briefly suspended operations in the morning before reopening a few hours later when the dust passed. Airports have been forced to suspend flights several times due to sandstorms in recent weeks.

In May, sandstorms sent thousands of people to hospital with respiratory problems, and left one person dead. Iraq, which is entering the scorching summer season when temperatures at times surpass 50 degrees Celsius, is ranked by the United Nations as one of the worlds five most vulnerable nations to climate change and desertification.

The environment ministry has warned that over the next two decades Iraq could endure an average of 272 days of sandstorms per year, rising to above 300 by 2050.

The World Bank warned in November that Iraq could suffer a 20 percent drop in water resources by 2050 due to climate change. Water shortages have been exacerbated by the building of upstream dams in neighbouring Turkey and Iran.

Published in Dawn,June 14th, 2022

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Iraq buffeted by 10th sandstorm in two months - DAWN.com

Ashki Shkur's first glimpses of the Vancouver area came from the back of an RCMP cruiser after she and her family were arrested for walking across the U.S. border in search of asylum in 2017.

Now the 18-year-old Britannia Secondary student, originally from Iraqi Kurdistan, is headed to the University of British Columbiain the fall with dreams of becoming a surgeon and of a scholarshipthat fully covers her tuition and residence.

"It feels like a dream. This is all I've asked for. This is all I've worked for my whole life to be able to follow my dreams and to be able to attend university," Shkur told CBC.

She's been awarded an $80,000 Centennial Scholars Entrance Award,which she has accepted. She was also offered a $70,000 TD Scholarship for Community Leadership, a $40,000 Beedie Luminaries scholarship, a $29,000 Terry Fox Awardand a number of other smaller scholarships, which will now go to other students.

Had she decided to attend Simon Fraser University in Burnaby instead, Shkur was granted scholarships that would have covered her tuition there as well.

"I really couldn't have done any of this without the community that I have at Britannia and the people that support me," Shkur said.

"When I first came here, as soon as I went to Britannia, I felt that sense of community that I never had back home."

Annie Danilko, president ofthe board of management for the Britannia Community Services Centre, where Shkur is also a board member, said it's no surprise to see the young woman having such success.

"The whole board was inspired by Ashki," Danilko said. "I didn't really know her history too much because she didn't really talk about it. She would talk instead about how she really wanted to give back to the communitythat she lives in because the community ... helped her so much."

Shkur, along with her parents,Ayub Nasralddin and Arazw Hama Ali and her younger sister Hanasa, joined a surge of irregular border crossings into Canada in 2017after then-president Donald Trump announced a ban on people entering the U.S. from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

They had left Iraq a little less than a year earlier, and Shkur said the plan was always to settle in Canada. She said as soon as her family landed in the U.S. in 2016, they hopped in a cab and headed for the border with Ontario to claim refugee status.

"I remember that was the only line that I knew in English, and I had to memorize it for a whole week. It was, 'Can we seek asylum?'" Shkur said.

But they were unaware of Canada's Safe Third Country Agreement with the U.S., which means refugee claimants are required to request asylum in the first "safe" country they land in. The family was turned back to the States and told they'd need to wait another year before trying to get into Canada.

They stayedin the U.S. almost long enough.

"Everything was great. My dad was working. We were going to school. And then President Donald Trump came," Shkur remembered. "We were afraid that we would get deported."

And so, the family crossed the border on foot near the Peace Arch crossing and were taken into custody.

Because they were a few days short of a full year, Shkur said, they had to request special consideration for permanent residency on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. The family spent a year gathering letters of support from community members, teachers, employers and anyone else they could find in order to be approved.

Now as she rounds out her final year at Britannia Secondary, Shkur is student council president and says she's usually at school from 8:40 a.m. until 6 p.m. every day, busy with school clubs and extracurriculars.

She spends some of her free time working with non-profits and serving on the board at the community centre.

Danilko, the board president, is Haida from Old Massettand said it's always been important for her to represent the voices of people who normally aren't heard, like Indigenous people, people with lower incomes and new immigrants.

She said it's clear Shkur shares that mission.

"When you have these very forward-thinking young people that are there, and they are fighting for the people that aren't being heard, they're changing things," Danilko said.

Shkur's family has added a new member since their arrival in B.C. little sister Niya is now three.

"Everyone says she's exactly like me," Shkur said, laughing.

Her dad, whom she credits for her strong work ethic, works as a landscaper, and her other sister is in Grade 9 at Britannia. They're all permanent residents now, and the family hopes to apply for Canadian citizenship next year.

Now that high school is nearly over, and everything is in place for university, Shkur said she might take some time to relax and celebrate.

"I will try my best, but I really love being busy. I can't imagine not knowing what I'm going to be doing. I just can't," she said.

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Vancouver teen who fled Iraq and then Trump heads to UBC with full-ride scholarship - CBC.ca

A Tory minister who was born in Iraq was asked what would have happened to him if he was sent to Rwanda, as the government's controversial migration scheme hits the headlines once more.

Nadhim Zahawi was interviewed yesterday ahead of the first planned flight to the country, which was later thwarted by the ECHR.

Sky News' Jayne Secker said one of the people scheduled to go on the plane was from Iraq and drew comparisons between him and Zahawi who came to the UK aged 11 from the country.

"How do you think you would have fared if you had been put on a plane and sent to Rwanda?" she asked.

Zahawi replied: "The important thing to remember is we have legal routes for immigration or for asylum and refuge in our country and we want to make sure that people come here legally."

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He also said he was "very proud" of schemes to settle people fleeing Afghanistan, Hong Kong and Ukraine but said gangs were "preying on the vulnerabilities of families" by "putting them on unsafe boats" in the channel.

"We've got to break their business model so that actually the legal routes are the way forward," he said. "Those people have arrived in a safe country in France. My family fled directly from Iraq to a safe country which is the United Kingdom and I'm very proud of that".

Last night the ECHR ruled that one of the seven people who had been scheduled to leave on the flight should not be removed. This allowed lawyers representing the others to make last-minute applications of their own.

Responding to the decision, Patel said she was disappointed by the legal challenge to the scheme which will send people arriving to the UK to the country and said that the policy will continue.

We will not be deterred from doing the right thing and delivering our plans to control our nations borders, she said. Our legal team are reviewing every decision made on this flight and preparation for the next flight begins now.

Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, said that the government must take responsibility for the failed flight, and indicated that the government does not mind clashing with lawyers and the European courts.

Ministers are pursuing a policy they know isnt workable and that wont tackle criminal gangs, she wrote on Twitter last night. But they still paid Rwanda 120m and hired a jet that hasnt taken off because they just want a row and someone else to blame.

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Tory MP who migrated from Iraq asked how he would have fared if put on plane to Rwanda - indy100