Italy is to ship 450 troops to defend Iraq’s strategic Mosul dam, close to the town occupied by Islamic State group fighters, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi introduced.
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Mosul Dam, opened by Saddam Hussein in 1983, is 131 m high and 3.2 km long, has a capacity of 8 million m³ and can supplying electricity to nearly 2 million people living in the area.
Even though Mosul is occupied by Daesh, Kurdish forces, backed by United States air strikes, retook the dam from the fundamentalists in August 2014.
Work will start nearly immediately to “safeguard the stability” of a dam that “is seriously damaged”, Trevi said in a statement.
“If the dam fails, scientists say Mosul could be completely flooded within hours and a 15-foot wall of water could crash into Baghdad”, said Keith Johnson of Foreign Policy. Kurdish Peshmerga fighters recaptured the dam two weeks later with the help of US and Iraqi government forces.
The 450 Italian troops will be in addition to the 750 already on the ground in Iraq as part of worldwide efforts. “We are not going to fight, but to intervene to preserve a dam – a piece of infrastructure that is essential to the future of Iraq and one that if abandoned, runs the risk of causing an environmental disaster”, she told RAI’s Agora talk show and added.
Deployed just up the road from Islamic State-held Mosul, Italian forces will be in a potential combat zone.
“It’s a new and important mission in a very hot area because the city is considered the capital of the (IS-declared) caliphate in Iraq, which is a crossroads for links to Syria”, Defence Minister Roberta Pinotti said.
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The Italian construction and energy company Trevi recently secured a contract worth $1.97 billion to provide maintenance to the dam.
