NGOs battle to rebuild village infrastructure in north

For a village at the heart of what used to be one of the bread baskets of Iraq, Khazna is a bleak place. A line of bone-dry hills to the north, whitened in places by gypsum quarries, field upon field of struggling wheat and barley, and a dozen or so tiny mud brick houses. Until last week, that's all there was. Khazna had neither electricity nor a school, and villagers were obliged to bring drinking water in from the town of Makhmur, eight kilometers to the north. Water tankers drove the last kilometre along a track little better than a ploughed field. "You can't really blame the other 40 or so families for deciding not to come back," village headman Farokh Kerim told IRIN, pointing to low mounds of mud he said marked the position of houses destroyed in 1986. Like others in Khazna, he is now optimistic the village can begin to live again. Two Arbil-based NGOs, the German Humedica and local Kurdistan Reconstruction and Development Society (KURDS), have renovated the school, installed a generator to pump water, provided the houses with electricity, and improved road access. The total cost of the operation was just under US $50,000, a sum provided by a frequent sponsor of Humedica, the German organisation Kinder Not Hilfe. Few doubt that the Mahmour district is in need of humanitarian aid. Largely Kurdish until the 1980s, its demography was radically altered by the former Baathist regime. KURDS' Director Ahmad Nadir claims as many as 300 villages were partially or totally destroyed. "We have seven projects to build or renovate schools in the district," Humedica project coordinator Michael Prestele told IRIN in Arbil. "But there's at least 50 other villages that could do with one too." Although many NGOs working out of Arbil turned their attention to Mahmour last spring, work was hampered by the political sensitivity of the region. Mahmour fell within the boundaries of the governorate of Arbil delineated by the previous administration of Saddam Hussein and between 1991 and 2003, it was to the south of the Green Line dividing the autonomous Kurdish zone from the rest of Iraq. But until March when the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) decided to bring it under Mosul its status was unclear. Humedica and KURDS solved the problem by cooperating directly with the Directorate of Education (DOE) in Mahmour town. It was the local DOE that provided materials for Khazna's new school - chairs, desks and stationary that had earlier been donated by another NGO. "We also signed a memorandum with the DOE to ensure that they will continue to look after our projects regardless of any later administrative changes," Prestele said. Right now, though, it is security rather than bureaucracy that is slowing the work of NGOs in the district. With only a limited presence of US and Kurdish troops, and Mosul only a stone's throw away, the safety of Mahmour's roads is no longer guaranteed. Humedica has had to abandon two school building projects in Arab villages 10 kilometres to the west of Khazna on the river Tigris. "Work in Mahmour region was already painfully slow," Nadir told IRIN in Arbil. "Now I'm afraid it might grind to a total halt." "This is the real tragedy of the current lack of security in Iraq," added Michael Prestele. "The areas of greatest need are slowly falling beyond our reach."