Iraqi Kurdistan’s Earthquake Concerns

Rudaw.net: SULAIMANI, Iraqi Kurdistan -- At 2 a.m. on October 10, Muhammad Siddiqi, 41, heard the windows of his house shaking. He awakened his wife and child, and ran to the street.
“I immediately knew it was an earthquake,” Siddiqi said.
Siddiqi, a resident of Soran, a town in Iraqi Kurdistan’s Erbil province, said he is worried that an earthquake similar to the massive quake that struck Van in eastern Turkey could occur in Soran as well.
“I am certain an earthquake will happen, but I’m not sure when and how strong it will be because we don’t have a specialist agency for (earthquakes) in our region,” he said.
The 7.2-magnitude earthquake that struck Van and Ercis last month killed hundreds and leveled buildings. Residents of Soran, Amedi, Qaladze are concerned about their own safety, especially after slight aftershocks reached their towns and caused minor damage.
The concern is shared by some of Kurdistan’s geologists who wrote a letter to the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) on October 26, urging them to consider a report by the Meteorological Center of Baghdad that warned of flooding in Iraqi Kurdistan if future earthquakes in southeast Turkey destroyed Turkey’s dams on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
Since 2006, Turkey has been building a dam on the Tigris River near the city of Van. It is due to be completed in 2013.
But Dara Hassan, director of Sulaimani’s Meteorology and Earthquakes department, dismissed Baghdad’s analysis as “baseless and wrong”.
Hassan told Rudaw, “No country has ever been able to predict earthquakes so far; even Japan can’t predict earthquakes despite their frequency there.”
Hassan admitted however, that small areas of Kurdistan might be affected if the Aylasu dam were to collapse in southeast Turkey.
“But the scale of the threat is not as great as the Meteorology of Baghdad has predicted,” he said. “Iraqi Kurdistan is 400,000 square meters; how could it all be flooded?”
Peshawa Muhammad, a professor at Sulaimani University, rejected Hassan’s assertion that earthquakes are entirely unpredictable, noting that the Van earthquake had been predicted two decades ago.
“In 1987 professor Suhail Alsinawi mentioned in a research that in the coming 25 years an 8.0-magnitude earthquake would occur somewhere between Khanaqin (in Iraqi Kurdistan) and southeast Turkey.”
Muhammad believes a devastating earthquake is likely to occur in Iraqi Kurdistan sometime in the next 25 years and said the Kurdish government should be prepared.
Bakhtiyar Qadir Aziz, an expert in geophysics and lecturer at Sulaimani University, said Iraqi Kurdistan is not on a fault line, but “this doesn’t mean we are safe from earthquakes.”
“Earthquakes might still happen but the impact would not be destructive,” he said.
Aziz said Kurdistan is neighboring Iran and Turkey — two countries with major fault lines that have a history of devastating earthquakes.
In a letter to Kurdistan Region presidency, Parliament and the KRG, a group of university professors and experts urged the leaders to hold a conference on earthquakes and install monitoring devices.
Bakar Mahammad Saeed, an official in Sulaimani’s Meteorology and Earthquakes Department, said that in 2011 more than 94 small earthquakes were recorded in Sulaimani province.

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