Samawah
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Samawah or As Samawah (Arabic language:السماوة) is a city in Iraq, 280 km southeast of Baghdad. The population was 250,000 in 2005. [1]
The city of Samawa is the modern capital of the Al Muthanna Governorate. The city is located mid-way between Baghdad and Basra, and at the northern edge of Muthanna province. The province was established in 1975, prior to that date it was a unified province along with Qadissiya (Diwaniya) and Najaf.
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[edit] History and attractions
The city is built on both sides of the Euphrates river, there are four bridges in the centre of town for crossing between the two sides. The west bank of the city contains the commercial heartland of the city, including the old town and the Jewish quarter 'agd al yahood'.
The west bank is the site of the covered market 'Sug Al Masgoof' which dates to the Ottoman period. The area surrounding the suq al masgoof is the old city with its byzantine of crowded markets and streets.
The eastern side of the city including 'Qushla' has a more modern feel and contains a number of estates of apartment blocks built during the 1970s and 1980s, the main stadium which is home to the local Muthanna team as well as technical colleges and the polytechnic.
The most famous attraction of Samawa are the ruins of the ancient Sumerian city of Uruk. This was the largest city in Sumer (extending over 2 km²), and dates to 4000 BC. Uruk was not only the largest urban connurbation of the first urban civilisation on earth, but is also the place where the first written script was discovered (oldest scripts dating back to 3300 BC).
Samawa is built on both sides of the Euphrates, and surrounded by hundreds of palm groves that give it a tropical feel, especially in the southern and northern suburbs.
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Samawa has a large salt lake called Lake Sawa, which had a tourist village that has since fallen into disrepair. The lake is located 25km to the north of the city centre and is accessible by road. The lake has no obvious source (neither river nor ancient link to a sea). The water is extremely salty due to heavy evaporation in the searing heat of mesopotamia and supports no marine life. A unique feature of the lake is that the water is above ground level and surrounded by natural levees. Due to the high levels of salt in the lake, the levees heal themselves if an artificial break is made in the levee, stopping the water from flowing down to ground level. The salt levels also improve buoyancy, and many migratory birds walk on the lake, akin to the biblical tales of Jesus.
Al Muthanna province contains one of the most notorious prisons in Iraq, which has been used since the time of the monarchy (1921-1958). "Nigret Al Salman" located in the small town of Al-Salman 200km south of the capital Samawa is a desert prison camp built in the style of a fortress where thousands have perished over the decades. It was used to house the prisoners from the Dujail massacre before their execution, as well as Kurdish prisoners since the first Kurdish revolts of the 1950s.
During 1964, the people of Samawa gained popular fame for rescuing over 1000 political prisoners of the Iraqi Communist Party who were sent in a 'Train of Death' (qutar al maut) metal cargo rolling stock from Baghdad to Samawa (en route to the Nigret Al Salman prison in the Desert) in 50C heat. The train was attacked by the population at the railway station and the dehydrated prisoners were watered and fed. Still over 100 prisoners had already perished en-route to Samawa.
The "Saray" on the east bank of Samawa is the historical home of authority, and authoritarianism in Samawa and dates from the period of the Ottoman Turkish Occupation. It has been the focus of revolts and popular uprisings by the local population for the past century including most recently in 1991 when hundreds of prisoners including women and children, as well as Kuwaiti hostages kidnapped by the Iraqi occupation forces in 1990 were freed from their captors by the people of Samawa.
Samawa's medical facilities had improved drastically since 2003, the renovation of the central hospital with the aid of Japanese development funds have realised a quantum leap in medical provision for the residents of the province. New facilites such as MRI scanning have been added to the existing medical units.
The residents of Samawa have used some simple and low cost means to brighten up the appearance of the grey concrete walls surrounding official buildings and schools through the painting of Samawa life scenes on walls. This tradition was started in the early 1970s, and was cut off during the period of Saddam Hussein's rule (1979-2003). The wall paintings put up since 2003 depict the new life achieved since the liberation.
[edit] Religion
Primarily Shiite, the town had been cut off almost entirely by Saddam after the Gulf War. Vast majority of the people are followers of Shi'a Islam. However, historically Samawa has been a mixed Jewish and Shia city[citation needed]. The terrorisation of the Jewish minority by Arab nationalists in the 1940s and 50s drove most of them into exile. The Synagogue, which has been abandonded since the flight of the jews, still exists in the qushla quarter of the east bank of Samawa. It is called the 'Torat Synagogue'.
In 1979-81 an ethnic cleansing campaign saw Shia Iraqis deemed to be of 'Persian' origin deported by the Baathi regime of Saddam Hussein.
Today, there is still a small population of Assyrian Christians in the city.
[edit] Industries
The unemployment rate is high, though agriculture and mining are active[citation needed]. The city, in spite of the lack of high value natural resources (oil and gas), and a lack of central government investment has managed to maintain lively small scale industrial, agricultural and alternative sectors despite the odds.
Samawa had the largest cement factories in the Middle East during the 1970s[citation needed] with a total production capacity of 2.85 Million tonnes/year of capacity. These have since fallen into disrepair, excarcebating the unemployment situation.
. Currently the four existing plants are producing a total of just 0.8Million tonnes/year due to the shortage of electricity. Five new cement factories with a capacity of 9M tonnes/year are under constuction in the outskirts of Samawa and will provide employment for several thousand skilled and unskilled employees as well as fulfilling 45% of Iraq's total cement needs.
A small Oil refinery was reopened in Samawa in 2005 after being idle for 15 years. The existing 10k b/d facility's capacity was doubled to 20k b'd in 2006 and is set to increase to 30k b/d by 2007. The facility is linked by pipeline to the new Kifl oil field in Samawa province that has an initial capacity of 40k b/d. The major advantage of the refinery is that it is designed for processing heavy crude oil, allowing the light crude to be exported.
The historical route between Mesopotamia and Saudi Arabia ran via Samawa, and it has been a main trading throughfare for Iraqi produce to Saudi Arabia.
Samawa is home to a rail yard for overhauling and maintaining the rolling stock and locomotives along the Baghdad-Basra rail routes.
There was an overhaul facility for the Iraqi Armoured corps based in Samawa and belonging to the military Industrial Commission.
In terms of agriculture, the staple mesopotamian produce is grown in Samawa, such as dates, wheat, barley, citrus fruits and tomatoes. In addition Samawa is home to the small and rare trade in wild truffles, which grow in the desert regions of Muthanna province.
The "Bahr al Milh" or Salt Sea located 20km to the south west of Samawa city is the main source of industrial salts in Iraq and large salt mining and processing facilities are located there to exploit this resource.
A thriving industry in traditional sun-baked brick manufacture exists on the outskirts of Samawa using primarily female labourers for forming and drying bricks. Large temporary kilns with chimney stacks as high as 30m are constructed by villagers in the surrounding region to make baked bricks in the same methods as used during the Sumerian and Akkadian periods.
Samawa has its own media industry, with the recently reopened Muthanna TV broadcasting terrestrial transmission to Samawa and the province. It focuses primarily on local news and issues, however the station gained notoriety as the Robin Hood of Television when it broadcast the 2006 world cup games without licence using a single subscription to a pay-per-view satellite channel. The central government were unable to enforce a ruling against the TV station to stop the transmissions.
There is a small cottage industry of carpet makers in the city, primarily employing women. The advantages of the local carpet makers are the availability of cheap raw materials, wool from the desert bedu who use Samawa as their main trading post, and the availability of low cost labourers in this poor city.
[edit] Reaching Samawa
Samawa is served by a highway for road traffic from Baghdad and Basra. The railway station has passenger services from both Baghdad and Basra and is the cheapest form of transport. Please note however that the railways station is located approximately 4 kilometers to the west of central Samawa.
[edit] Security since 2003 invasion
Since the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, the town has had the least amount of problems with Coalition forces, with insurgent activity practically non-existent[citation needed].
Elements of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division and 1-41 Infantry, 1st Armored Division, took the town during a fierce running battle with emplaced Fedayeen forces in the days after the initial invasion. After the initial combat phase ended in May 2003, the 82nd was relieved by U.S. Marines from RCT-5, 1st Marine Division. Control of the city was handed over to Dutch forces in August 2003.
Japan Self-Defense Forces, stationed in Samawah since January 2004, are scheduled to leave by the end of July 2006.[2] British and Australian troops departed, turning Samawah and the entire province into the first responsible for its own security and branded, in iraqi parlance as the first "green province", meaning fully independent.[2]
