A group of residents of a neighborhood in the city of Kirkuk launched a campaign to reduce the phenomenon of littering in a street of Kirkuk, and they restored and decorated the walls with flowers and colors.
This voluntary initiative comes after the Kirkuk administration stressed, more than a year ago, its inability to clean all parts of the city of accumulated waste due to the lack of the required budget.
This place is located in Al-Hurriya neighborhood near Kirkuk International Stadium. Previously, a section of the neighborhood's residents and tricycles were piling garbage at the site.
The municipality of Kirkuk was collecting the accumulated waste in that place once every few weeks, but that was not enough, as waste accumulated at the site in few days.
Qasim Issa, a retired teacher from the neighborhood, told KirkukNow, "The last time the municipality teams came to clean the place, I took the opportunity and set up a tent here to guard the site and prevent people from littering there."
“We have been guarding the place for about 15 days, sometimes they would come here around 2:00 AM to throw trash here, but we would prevent them,” Issa added. “We cleaned the place and renovated the wall and painted it, then put natural flowers so that people would know that this place is not for littering anymore."
We have been guarding the place for about 15 days
The oil-rich city of Kirkuk, pumps 2-3 million barrels a month generating hundreds of million Dollars for national revenues which 90% rely on oil marketing while the province suffers from proper basic public services in all sectors, in particular education and healthcare.
Kirkuk, Iraq’s second largest reserves, located 238 kilometers north of Baghdad, is an ethnically mixed province for 1,7 million Kurds, Arabs, and Turkmens. It has long been at the center of disputes between Baghdad and the Erbil.
Sarteeb Qadir, a resident of the neighborhood, said, "You see what it was like a month ago and how it is now...Many people are applauding us, expressing their astonishment at the great change that has taken place here in such a short period of time."
"What the government could not do, we did in a short period of time for our neighborhood and at our own expense."
The municipality of Kirkuk stressed on more than one occasion that it can remove only about 300 tons of waste per day, while about 1,200 tons of waste accumulate in the city.
