The kitchen area in Hassan Atshan Nassar's one-room home attached to the back of an elementary school in the modernized center of the village Suq ash Shuyukh on the outskirts of Nasiriyah, Iraq, Sunday, August 3, 2003. To support his family of seven, he is a security guard at the school and earns $60 USD/month. Before Saddam Hussein was toppled, he earned about $10/month...Since the 1991 uprising against Saddam Hussein in Shiite dominated Southern Iraq, people of this area have suffered greatly through his methods of disrupting daily life. For example, modernization came to a hault as money was diverted to Baath Party strongholds. Check points on on every other corner made it nearly impossible to go to work, the doctor, or visit family. Teachers made $5 U.S. per month and had to spend almost all of their salary for taxis in order to go to work...He tried to kill the people by cutting off the rivers that village survival depends on. Dams and canals dirverted the fresh water from flowing into the swamps by way of tributaries. In effect, without fresh water flowing in, the people started poisoning the water supply themselves by using it to wash and clean. Their primitive sewers still flow freely into the same waters that animals use and that feed their rice fields.
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