Cleanup Ambassadors help Tigris river green projects (thearabweekly.com)

Garbage clogs the banks of Iraq’s Tigris River in Baghdad but an army of young volunteers is cleaning it, a rare environmental project in the war-battered country.

With boots and gloves, around 200 volunteers pick up soggy trash, water bottles, aluminium cans and muddy styrofoam boxes, part of a green activist campaign called the Cleanup Ambassadors.

“It breaks my heart to see the banks of the Tigris in this state,” said one 19-year-old volunteer, who gave only her first name, Rassel, working under Baghdad’s Imams Bridge.

“We want to change this reality. I want to make my city more beautiful.”