Al-Maliki

New Delhi. Aug. 21: Iraq has turned to India to restore the ancient waterways that made it a cradle of human civilisation, reviving a link that dates back over 4,000 years to the trade network that bound Mesopotamia to the Indus Valley.

Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is visiting India on Thursday for the first meet between the heads of government of the two nations since 1975 when Indira Gandhi visited Baghdad.

Al-Maliki and Manmohan Singh will likely ink an agreement under which India will help Iraq — that means fertile land in Arabic — restore the Tigris and Euphrates waterways that have suffered for three decades under the collective assault of Saddam Hussain’s flawed water management policies and serial wars, officials said here on Thursday.

“These rivers are today a shadow of what they were just 30-40 years back,” a senior diplomat said. “The Iraqis want us to help prepare a blueprint to restore these great rivers to their past glory.”

For India, the water management pact is an attempt to broaden its relationship with Iraq beyond just oil. Iraq has replaced Iran as India’s second-largest supplier of crude, and the two nations will also sign a pact on greater and more comprehensive energy cooperation. But India is keen not to let its ties with Iraq get bogged down into merely a buyer-seller relationship — of the $21 billion bilateral trade between the nations, about $20 billion comes from the oil India purchases.

Al-Maliki, who will visit the Taj Mahal briefly, will also speak with leaders of Indian industry on Saturday.

For Iraq, the pact that it will sign with India’s ministry of water resources offer a chance to rework water management policies, largely still stuck in the 1980s and 1990s, officials said.

During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, Hussain, who ruled Iraq till he was toppled by US forces in 2003, drained the Marshallese region of the Tigris-Euphrates water system to allow his forces to access the area to assert themselves over the Arabs there.

During both the 1991 and 2003 wars, western troops targeted several dams and sewer water treatment plants, effectively pushing tonnes of sewage into the Tigris and Euphrates. Pollutants from a bombed chemical factory and stolen uranium from a nuclear facility in southern Iraq also flowed into these rivers.