Packing the House
How Nouri al-Maliki's Election Tricks May Doom Iraq
By Rasha Kelani, Edited by Emily Dische-Becker
Published Oct 30, 2014
Packing the House
How Nouri al-Maliki's Election Tricks May Doom Iraq
Iraq's former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was forced from power two months ago. With Iraq still in crisis mode, the parliament he helped elect lives on. This story documents a pattern of bribing poor voters with bogus land deeds, a tactic that succeeded in stacking parliament with Maliki's relatives and cronies.
Uprooted and Out of School
By Xanthe Ackerman, edited by Diana Jean Schemo
Published Feb 20, 2020
Uprooted and Out of School
With civil war raging and Islamic State killing non-Muslims, Turkey has taken more than a million Syrian refugees. It shelters, feeds and educates many of them in state-of-the-art camps along the southern border. But Turkey extends the help as a matter of hospitality, not international obligation. And that is getting in the way of educating Syria's uprooted children.
Middleman's Dilemma
The Rise and Fall of Mahmoud Thiam
Laura Rena Murray and Beth Morrissey
Not a Bang but a Whimper
U.S. Justice Department Settles in Signal Graft Case
Douglas Gillison
Published Feb 20, 2020
Not a Bang but a Whimper
U.S. Justice Department Settles in Signal Graft Case
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Tainted Waters
Chad Bouchard and 100Reporters
Published Sep 16, 2014
Tainted Waters
In late 2013, while extremists of Islamic State were still building forces to fuel their recent surge of violence, 100Reporters’ Chad Bouchard visited Ninewa province in northwestern Iraq to investigate allegations of corruption in the district’s essential water systems. In the city of Sinjar, later to become a maelstrom of Islamic State brutality, foul drinking water was causing outbreaks of diarrhea and other preventable diseases. Old pumps drew water from the ground, up into rusty pipes that pass through gutters and open sewers where bacteria breeds. Use of chlorine and other treatments that could have cleaned the water was sporadic and not monitored.
The U.S. government spent nearly $18 million to dig wells and install pipelines in Sinjar, but failed to keep tabs on a project that in the end only benefited foreign contractors. Local government siphoned money budgeted to pay employees and fuel meant to run generators, leaving the people of Sinjar with no source of clean water and producing kidney disease at 15 times the rate elsewhere in Ninewa province.
As the U.S. takes up the battle against Islamic State, Tainted Waters offers a close look at the terrain in which the group has taken root and grown. It reveals a city hamstrung by graft and mired in resentment, and paints an early, intimate portrait of how Sinjar's citizens paid for their government’s shortcomings.
