Who will pick up the massive tab to rebuild Mosul?

Who will pick up the massive tab to rebuild Mosul?
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By Euronews
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Officials in Mosul warn that a failure to reconstruct Mosul after being obliterated in the battle to defeat ISIL could result in the rebirth of terrorism.

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After three years of war with ISIL, hardly a single building remains intact in Mosul.

Baghdad says the repair bill for the whole of Iraq will cost around $100 billion, or around 83 billion euros. Local leaders in Mosul say that amount alone is needed to rehabilitate their city, though the true cost is incalculable.

Many Iraqis ultimately blame ISIL for the destruction, but they believe the nations who funded the war effort should be responsible for rebuilding in the wake of victory.

They have also warned that a failure to rebuild Mosul may resurrect the spectre of terrorism.

The Trump administration, however, has told Iraq it will not play any part in footing the reconstruction bill.

Abdulsattar al-Habu, the director of Mosul's municipality said: "The US government is supposed to be one of the first to contribute to the reconstruction process because they are the number one global power. They are the ones that allowed these terrorists from all over the world to come to Mosul and, as a result, they destroyed one of the oldest cities in the Middle East."

The United Nations estimates some 40,000 homes need to be rebuilt or restored in Mosul, with every acre of the northern Iraqi city weighed down by more than 3,000 tons of rubble, much of it laced with explosives and unexploded ordnance.

Some 600,000 residents have been unable to return to the city, once home to around two million people.

Iraq hopes Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries will contribute to rebuilding the city, with Iran also taking a role. Corruption and bitter sectarian divisions complicate the situation.

The areas in Iraq with the worst destruction are largely Sunni, while the Baghdad government is Shiite-dominated.

The fear is that if Sunni populations feel they have been abandoned and left to fend for themselves in shattered cities, the resentment will feed the next wave of sectarian violence.

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