Akashat
Place in Al-Anbar, Iraq
Akashat (Arabic: عكاشات) is a small town in the northwest of the Ar-Rutba District of the Al Anbar province of Iraq, on the road between the towns of Ar-Rutbah and Al-Qa'im. It has a population of around 5,000. It was built as an industrial village in 1985, attached to the local phosphate quarry and administered by the ministry of industry. The Phosphate Plant in the town employs roughly 50-60 permanent workers. Production there was seriously disrupted by the UN sanctions after 1991 and the 2003 war, essentially stopped it from working. It is now operating at around 10%.
01Transport
It is the terminus of a branchline of the national railway system. It serves a phosphate mine.
The railroad tracks stretch all the way east to Hadithah where they connect in the south to the Persian Gulf and northward eventually to Europe. The phosphate quarry sporadically sends a trainload of raw material to Al Qaim.
02Uranium production
The Akashat Mine, located 420 km west of Baghdad, is a uranium ore production facility associated with the Al Qaim site. Iraq has reserves of uranium ore which continue to be mined at Akashat, on the border with Syria. The Al Qaim facility, 100 km to the north east, remains capable of ore refinement. By the mid-1980s Iraq had at least 164 tons of yellowcake, obtained at the Akashat mine and processed in Iraq at Al Qaim, a plant built by a Swiss company.
032013 ambush
On 4 March 2013, as part of both the post-U.S. withdrawal Iraqi insurgency and the Syrian civil war, an ambush took place in Akashat by the Islamic State of Iraq. There was no clear victor, but 51 of the 64 Syrian Army soldiers involved in the ambush were killed, along with 13 Iraqi troops.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Akashat”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Iq-map-pol96.jpg by Unknown author, Public domain
- Railroad tracks Akashat Iraq.jpg by John A Matel, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Villiage of Sikak in Akashat, Iraq.jpg by John A Matel, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Phosphate plant in Akashat.jpg by John A Matel, CC BY-SA 3.0
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