"There is no electricity, no water, no schools..."
News: Will the marshes of southern Iraq ever recover from decades of devastation?
August 9, 2005
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About an hour north of Basra, a young boy poles a canoe-like boat through the marshes between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
It was around these marshes that ancient civilization once thrived in Mesopotamia. Not far away are the ruins of Ur, a Sumerian trading center built 5000 years ago. In the 1980s and '90s, the marshes became a center of resistance against Saddam Hussein's government, as well as a smuggling point on the way to and from Iran. After the Shiite uprising in 1991, Saddam Hussein ordered the area drained—in part to flush out the rebels—and destroyed a number of villages. All told, as much as 90 percent of the marshes were burnt, displacing virtually all of the 350,000 to 500,000 inhabitants of the area, who had previously subsisted largely on fishing, raising water buffalo, and harvesting the local reeds—from which they built their houses.
In April 2003, after the fall of Saddam's regime, non-governmental organizations and the new interim government's Ministry of Water initiated a project to re-flood the marshes. Water has returned to roughly 15 to 20 percent of the estimated 12,000 to 15,000 square kilometers that were drained. Thus far, the plan has been carried out haphazardly, due to the post-invasion chaos and a lack of experts working on the project; in some places, residents have simply cut through existing roads to allow water flow. Meanwhile, some of the region's current inhabitants stand to lose their homes if all of the original land is re-flooded.
The reeds have returned, as well as some of the wildlife, and so have as many as 70,000 people. Not everyone, however, has returned to the region out of desire to return to their old way of life. Kheerea Shooween left the marshes in the 1990s and moved to Mussayib, a town about an hour south of Baghdad. Her family became farmers there, but two months ago they finally moved back to the marshes, because of violence in the area, often directed at Shiite Muslims. (Virtually all of the Marsh Arabs are Shiite, and they're often the focus of a good deal of racism and discrimination. After they left the marshes, many of them moved into tent camps or to the outskirts of Baghdad and Basra, where they were considered untouchables.)
Nearby are the remains of a village, a reminder of previous oppressions and displacements. The houses and municipal buildings have been reduced to their crumbling foundations, either sitting on small green islands in the areas that have been reflooded or else desolately in the salt flats on the other side of the road, where the water has not returned.
"There is no electricity, no water, no schools," Shooween says.
Others say they have no interest in returning to their former way of life. Mutlaq Saleh Hassan, the head of the Albu Sweileh tribe, once lived by fishing, herding and hunting birds. His family left the marshes in the 1980s but returned in 1997. He and his sons now work as a day laborers in a nearby town and are living in an area that was once underwater. The area is among the poorest in the country, and lacks much basic infrastructure—residents place 55-gallon barrels on the side of the main road like mailboxes, to be filled each day by a water tanker.
"We went to the governorate and asked them to build a dam so that our land won't be flooded. They sent it to Baghdad, and the government said we would have a dam. But they have not built it. We want the water to be back, but we also want proper housing," Hassan said, referring to the cinderblock dwelling his family built when they returned to the area.
Azzam Al-Awash is the head of Eden Again, a project dedicated to refilling the marshes. Trained as a civil engineer, Awash emigrated from Iraq to California when he was 20. While growing up, he had traveled to and seen the marshes with his father, the district's head engineer. He returned to Iraq shortly after the invasion, and now employs 60 Iraqis on the project, which includes a plan for completely re-flooding the area and building villages.
Awash's plan, which he recently presented to the Iraqi National Assembly, has come into conflict with a pre-existing plan by the Ministry of Agriculture—drawn up in the 1980s—that calls for the irrigation of some of the land that has been cleared and for total reclamation of marshland for farming by 2025.
"If there is political will to restore the marshes, we can restore the marshes," Awash said. As for the farmers, who live in a land where the salt leaves a crust of white on the light-brown earth: "The groundwater table is salty, it burns. At first everything grows, but you see them now, instead of harvesting, they just let their cattle graze," Awash said. "The people who tell you they want to farm here are either confused or don't understand the question."
Awash's team spent three months intensely studying the restoration of the marshes near the town of Abu Zirig—some of the first to be re-flooded. Buffalo had returned to the area, as had the fish and some of the birds. Seeing new species appearing in the local market, Awash paid one hunter to take him to where the birds had been found and discovered rookeries.
"It was like, what's going on here?" he said. "We couldn't believe it. The reeds were coming back."
Education might the biggest hurdle to restoring the marshes. Some fishermen who have returned to the area use arsenic or even dynamite to make their catches. Further upstream, cities such as Baghdad pour their waste directly into the river. The same occurs with runoff from farmers' fields. "Iraq uses the Tigris as an open sewer," Awash says.
Awash has a plan to build villages in the marshes, complete with modern amenities, that would subsist on the old methods of fishing, herding and cutting reeds. He hopes to build the first village in the next year and then tweak the model for future projects, based on its success.
Awash's optimism—"In five years, we could have ecotourism here," he says—is perhaps too rosy for one of the poorest parts of the country, and an area that is still dangerous. Even with a small economic revival in the region, the the men who took this journalist to the marshes still insisted on carrying guns for safety, and were careful to explain to people in the villages that we had no association with an American NGO that, the people said, had made promises of reconstruction but had not been seen in six months. (Officially, the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent $4 million on restoration over the past four years.) The area is still extremely tribal, so much so that some of the men in Al-Medina, a town about a half-hour north of Basra, claim that doctors are afraid to operate on patients for fear they will be blamed if the patient dies.
"Police are sometimes afraid to make arrests," one man says.
The people also once again feel abandoned by the central government. They swarm our cars, shouting "maku!" (nothing). No water, no gas, no electricity. These are the same complaints heard across the country. Iraqis are at least unified in this.
David Enders is a freelance journalist who has been working in Iraq for most of the last two years. His first book, Baghdad Bulletin, is available from University of Michigan Press.
