The complexes of dirt mounds – Tal Aldair and Sobbar Abu Habba – were once Sumerian city walls outside of what is today Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad. Pottery and clay tablets with the world’s first form of writing, Cuneiform, are known to be in the mounds. The Sumerian culture is the oldest civilization in the world, dating back to the 6th century B.C.
Nov 4th, 2009
“This will be the only factory in the area with fresh frozen chicken,” said Lumsden, a native of Fuquay-Varina, N.C. “Iraqis want very fresh chicken, but their choices right now are canned chicken or chicken that is imported.”
Aug 11th, 2009
Capt. Sara Woods calls it “sweet water;” the clean, potable ground water that hides under the dusty farmland at a depth of about 20 meters. That sweet water is the key to helping rural Iraqis enjoy greater health and more productive livestock.
Woods is the chief of Civil Affairs Team 31, currently attached to the North Carolina National Guard’s 1st Battalion, 120th Infantry Regiment, 30th Heavy Brigade Combat Team, and her job is to help Iraqis help themselves by setting up wells and teaching them how to operate them.
The civil affairs team, and a platoon of infantrymen providing security, visited well sites near Mahmudiyah, here, Aug. 9, to check on their condition and level of use by local farm families.
“What [a well] does is provide everyone with clean drinking water, for people and animals; for an entire cluster of farm families,” said Woods, a native of Janesville, Minn. “From the well, all the families can come in and get good drinking water.”