Water taps run dry during peak heat

Muhammad Jaffar Abdullah, 4, sips water in the Shiite enclave of Sadr City in eastern Baghdad. Most of the Iraqi capital has been without water for two days, but the eastern part of the city has seen shortages for about the last week.

U.S. deaths

As of Thursday, at least 3,659 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

Baghdad ? Much of the Iraqi capital was without running water Thursday and had been for at least 24 hours, compounding the urban misery in a war zone and the blistering heat at the height of the Baghdad summer.

Residents and city officials said large sections west of the capital had been virtually dry for six days because the already strained electricity grid could not provide sufficient power to run water purification and pumping stations.

Baghdad routinely suffers from periodic water outages, but this one is described by residents as one of the most extended and widespread in recent memory. The problem highlights the larger difficulties in a capital beset by violence, crumbling infrastructure, rampant crime and too little electricity to keep cool in the sweltering weather more than four years after the U.S.-led invasion.

Jamil Hussein, a 52-year-old retired army officer who lives in northeast Baghdad, said his house had been without water for two weeks, except for two hours at night. He says the water that does flow smells and is unclean.

Two of his children have severe diarrhea that the doctor attributed to drinking what tap water was available, even after it was boiled.

Adel al-Ardawi, a spokesman for the Baghdad city government, said that even with sufficient electricity “it would take 24 hours for the water mains to refill so we can begin pumping to residents. And even then the water won’t be clean for a time. We just don’t have the electricity or fuel for our generators to keep the system flowing.”

Noah Miller, spokesman for the U.S. reconstruction program in Baghdad, said water treatment plants were working “as far as we know.”

He said there had been a nationwide power blackout for a few hours Wednesday night that might be causing problems for all systems that depend on Iraq’s already creaking electricity grid.