The Iraq Water Project

The Iraq Water Project (IWP) is a project of Veterans for Peace, Inc. (VFP), a national veterans Peace & Justice organization based in St. Louis, Missouri. Our principal partner in IWP is Life for Relief & Development, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Southfield, Michigan, and dedicated to alleviating human suffering in Iraq and many other parts of the world.

Thousands of families now have access to clean water.

Prior to the March 2003 US invasion, the Iraq Water Project sent three teams of veterans to Iraq who paid their own expenses and worked alongside the Iraqi laborers repairing water treatment plants. We were then proud to announce that thanks to the IWP six water treatment plants in different cities and provinces of Iraq were once again sending clean drinking water to more than 85.000 people. Read a post-invasion report  by our IWP Project Coordinator sent from Iraq in August 2003.

Tribute to Edilith Eckhart, Co-Founder, Iraq Water Project

Project History

In 1999, responding to the continuing crisis in Iraq due to the first Gulf War and the devastating, comprehensive sanctions imposed by the United Nations, Veterans for Peace members in the United States created the Iraq Water Project.

The primary goal of the Iraq Water Project has been to save lives.

The second, but equally important goal of the original IWP was to educate the American people about the devastating effects a decade of sanctions had on the average citizens of Iraq and to force an end to these sanctions against Iraq. 

The sanctions have been lifted, not as we hoped, through education and pressure on the US government, but as a byproduct of US President George W. Bush’s unprovoked attack on that nation.  The sanctions have been lifted because the War on Iraq completed the desolation of the infrastructure, a foreseeable consequence that was completely ignored in prewar planning.  The US made sure the oil was flowing, but did nothing to prepare for the chaos that comes after the  violent fall of a government.  Now it is not only the vast rural areas that are without safe drinking water, but the big cities as well.  The US government and its Iraqi understudy have been unable to even get the lights reliably on, feed the hungry or provide basic health care.

Before this latest war, and in calamitous consequence of earlier US policy, Iraq was a social and environmental disaster in the making.  Now it is a social and environmental disaster, assembled and delivered.

IWP Future

A major readjustment of the project’s approach was clearly necessitated by the advent of the United States invasion and occupation.  The project goal of demonstrating to Americans the pernicious consequences of our government’s Iraq policy remains, however, as important as ever.  But the unabating chaos that this war brought, and the vastly heightened danger to personnel engaged in reconstruction are obstacles not lightly dismissed.

As far as possible, and consistent with the safety of our on-the-ground partner, we will continue  working with Life for Relief and Development to effect repairs at IWP’s first six water treatment plants, and make good damages done to these plants by our own country’s belligerent actions.  For any number of reasons, though, it may prove necessary to select a project somewhere else, in which case we will still be fulfilling our basic purposes, as the water situation in most of Iraq is pretty dire throughout.