Iraqi dust blankets UAE

Abd Al-Khaleq Tharwat
For Al-Shorfa.com
2009-08-10

A Saudi man covers his face on a balcony during a sandstorm in Riyadh. The Arabian peninsula was recently engulfed by a sandstorm, cutting visibility. (AFP/Getty Images)

ABU DHABI — Satellite images of the cloud of dust that has been looming over the United Arab Emirates and the Arabian peninsula since the beginning of the month present a vast and peculiar meteorological phenomenon. Scientific opinions vary on the cause of the dust cloud’s formation, but they agree that it originated in Iraq. Some environmentalists attribute it to Iraq's increasingly arid climate and dried bodies of water. Adnan Akber, a researcher in the Water Resources Division of the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research, has another theory.

He contends that military operations in Iraq have led to changes in the face of the region. Akber and many of his colleagues claim that the movement of military forces and vehicles in Iraq for a period of six years, along with an increasingly arid climate, has turned dry soil into minute dust particles easily carried in the atmosphere.

Akber also agrees with Iraqi physics professor Mohammed Akef Jamal that the marshes in Iraq, which are suffering from a devastating drought for the consecutive second year, are also a factor in the dust cloud.

Meteorologists in Dubai and Iraq, who thoroughly examined satellite images showing a dense, brown cloud over the Arabian peninsula, say that the dust storm is likely to have originated from the Euphrates River in Iraq, the flow of which is rapidly shrinking as the result of the current drought situation, compounded by the construction of dams on the river both in Turkey and Syria.

Some experts disagree with the theory that movements of U.S. forces are to blame for the phenomenon. They assert that billions of tonnes of moving sand are required to form such a cloud that the movement of U.S. military vehicles simply could not generate.

Whatever the real reason, experts agree that Iraq is on the brink of environmental collapse, a scenario that heralds serious environmental consequences for the United Arab Emirates and the Arabian peninsula as a whole. At the peak of the dust storm, visibility was reduced just 300 metres, posing a danger to both motorists and pedestrians.

Sources: Gulf News /

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