arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

In Basra, Iraq Scavengers Dismantle Their Own City
Fri May 23, - Reuters to My Yahoo! by Andrew Marshall

BASRA, Iraq - Hamed Fadil was watching a Lebanese musical on video when his house in the Iraqi city of Basra was plunged into darkness. Looking out of the window, he saw looters race off with the street's underground power cables. "Every few days this happens," he said, spitting on the ground in disgust. "How can people destroy their own city like this? Have they no shame?"

Stealing copper power cables has become a lucrative business for Basra's scavengers, part of a network of looters who are trucking huge quantities of copper scrap to Kuwait and Iran, overwhelming the British military police trying to restore order to the city.

Electricity was supposed to have been restored to Basra weeks ago but large parts of the city are routinely hit by lengthy power cuts -- often caused by looting, as thieves dig up cables to sell the metal. A trader in Kuwait told Reuters earlier this week he had received 1,000 tonnes of copper scrap -- worth more than $1.5 million -- every day over the past fortnight. That means copper is being hauled out of Iraq (news - web sites) at a rate equivalent to more than a third of the world's regular scrap supply, traders said.

Thick black smoke can often be seen rising into the sky above Basra, as scavengers burn off the rubber casing from the stolen cable. The metal is sold to traders in the city who collect it and transport it in bulk out of Iraq.

British military police on patrol in Basra say there is often little they can do. "When we arrived at one market this week there were tonnes of copper piled up ready to be trucked out," said Sergeant Graham Smith. "But all the Iraqis there denied having anything to do with it, and there was too much of it for us to take it. We just had to leave it. It will be out of the country by now."

Many of the looters come from the impoverished slum district of Hayaniya on the western edge of Basra. The streets of the neighborhood look like a post-Apocalypse scrap yard -- looted metal lies everywhere in vast piles, beside mounds of stinking garbage and gutters awash with raw sewage. The factories in the district are skeletal shells, stripped of anything of value. Looters roam the streets in donkey carts piled high with scrap metal. British police say there are too many looters to arrest and detain -- when they catch thieves, they usually just cut their donkeys loose and move on. "Our job is to track down active criminals, but obviously things are different in a neighborhood like this where virtually everybody is an active criminal," said Second Lieutenant Russell Cowhig, the British military policeman in charge of the district. "We just do what we can."