Iraq’s renewed marshes are once again in peril
Mismanagement, upstream projects take toll on villagers.
In the southern CHABAISH,IRAQ— marshlands of Iraq, Firas Fadl steers his boat through tunnels of towering reeds, past floating villages and half-submerged water buffaloes in a unique region that seems a world apart from the rest of the arid Middle East.
The marshes, a lush remnant of the cradle of civilization, were reborn after the 2003 fall of Saddam Hussein when residents dismantled dams he had built a decade earlier to drain the area in order root out Shiite rebels. But now the largest wetlands in the Middle East are imperiled again, by government mismanagement and new upstream projects.
Fadl, at 26, is too young to remember the death and rebirth of the marshes, but he has seen their steady decline in recent years as he has struggled to make a living by fishing the brackish waters. Upstream electrical dams and irrigation projects have reduced the flow of freshwater, allowing saltwater from the Persian Gulf to seep in.
“The situation is good, it’s just the water is bad,” he said. “Ever since 2012, the water hasn’t been fresh.”
Farming and sewage runoff have depleted fishing stocks, forcing some fishermen to resort to using car batteries and chemicals. The flares of nearby oil wells light up the night sky, but the sweltering, humid region remains mired in poverty.
Facing a lack of employment options, hundreds of young men from the area took up arms in the fight against the Islamic State group, joining state-sanctioned Shiite militias. Posters honoring the fallen crowd traffic circles along the roads leading to the wetlands and line the walls inside a monument honoring those killed by Saddam a generation earlier.
The overwhelmingly Shiite region rose up against Saddam’s Sunni-dominated government in 1991 after his crushing defeat in the Gulf War, and the rebels took cover in the marshes as they battled his forces. The government responded by deliberately draining 20,000 square kilometers (7,700 square miles) of wetlands, turning the area to desert and displacing half a million people.
Andrew Whitley, a former Human Rights Watch researcher who interviewed survivors at the time, described the draining of the marshes as a “large-scale crime against humanity.”
Iraqis who lived through that era speak of a paradise lost.
“The marshes were a state outside of Saddam’s control. The resources were a great boon,” recalls Fadel Duwaish, 84, who was displaced in the 1990s and only returned in 2003. “The marshes contained a wealth of fish, the wealth of raising water buffalo. You could turn the reeds into paper. All of the marsh was a treasure.”
After the 2003 U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam, residents dismantled the local dams, allowing the waters to return, and with them the plants and animals on which the community relied. The revitalization of the wetland was hailed as a rare success story in a country beset by conflict. But still, today’s marshlands are only around 14 percent of what they were in the 1970s.
Development along the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, particularly the construction of so-called mega dams under Turkey’s Southeast Anatolia Project, have caused a 40-45 percent reduction in downstream flow in the Euphrates alone, according to a 2015 report from Chatham house, a London-based think tank.
The 6,000 people who live in the marshes dwell in thatch huts and barns, relying on fishing and the raising of water buffalo.