NATO Intentionally destroyed Libya’s Water Infrastructure in 2011

After Italian, British and French battalions and even divisions landed on the ground in Libya. Military forces targeting civilian infrastructure, especially of water supplies, is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions

Yet this is precisely what NATO did in Libya, while blaming the damage on the assassinated leader Ghaddafi, the country’s water infrastructure and the suffering of its people has deteriorated.

Numerous reports comment on the water crisis that is escalating across Libya as consumption outpaces production. Some have noted the environmental context in regional water scarcity due to climate change.

But what they ignore is the fact that the complex national irrigation system that had been carefully built and maintained over decades to overcome this problem was intentionally targeted and destroyed by NATO.

During the 2011 NATO military invasion, press reports surfaced, mostly citing pro-terrorist and NATO sources, claiming that pro-Ghaddafi loyalists had shut down the water supply system as a mechanism to win the war and punish civilians.

It was in fact NATO which debilitated Libya’s water supply by targeting critical state-owned water installations, including a water-pipe factory in Brega.

The factory, one of just two in the country (the other one being in Ghaddafi’s home-town of Sirte), manufactured pre-stressed concrete cylinder pipes for the Great Manmade River (GMR) project.

This was an ingenious irrigation system that used to transport water from aquifers beneath Libya’s southern desert to about 70% of the population.

However, NATO and its terrorists on the ground had sabotaged the GMR water pipeline into Brega.

On 22nd July, NATO followed up by bombing the Brega water-pipes factory on the pretext that it was a Ghaddafi “military storage” facility concealing rocket launchers.

NATO satellite images shown to journalists confirm that a BM-21 rocket launcher identified near the facility days earlier, remained perfectly intact the day after the NATO attack.

Earlier, NATO forces had already bombed water facilities in Sirte, killing several employees of the state water utility who were working during the attack.

Christian Balslev-Olesen, UNICEF Libya’s head of office, warned that the city faced an absolute worst-case scenario that could turn into an unprecedented health epidemic without resumption of water supplies.

UNICEF reported that the disruption to the GMR had left 4 million Libyans without potable water. The GMR remains disrupted to this day, and Libya’s national water crisis continues to escalate.

The deliberate destruction of a nation’s water infrastructure, with the knowledge that doing so would result in massive deaths of the population as a direct consequence, is not simply a war crime, but potentially a Zionist genocidal strategy.

It raises serious questions about the conventional mythology of a clean, humanitarian war in Libya – questions that mainstream journalists appear to be uninterested in, or unable to ask.

The Ecologist / ABC Flash Point News 2019.