Five Years Later

Hannah Allam reports from Baghdad for McClatchy:

Iraq’s most prominent clerics have ruled that using a water pump on one’s own pipes is akin to stealing resources from a neighbor, so what does a person do when it takes half an hour to fill a cooking pot with water from the tap?

Iraqis pray for forgiveness, then pump away.

To them, the real crime is that five years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, they still swelter in the summer and freeze in the winter because of a lack of electricity. Government rations are inevitably late, incomplete or expired. Garbage piles up for days, sometimes weeks, emanating toxic fumes.