WHATEVER happened to worries about the environment in Iraq? Flagged up immediately after last year’s invasion as a major concern by the UN and others, it has all but disappeared from the reconstruction agenda.
That is the view of senior British politician Peter Ainsworth, a Conservative MP and chair of the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee. On Monday he announced an inquiry to explore why environmental concerns are not being factored into “military operations and construction” plans.
“It’s very disappointing,” Ainsworth says. Almost a year after the invasion, Baghdad does not have a single operational sewage works; the country’s main rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, are filling with raw sewage and…
