A traditional mudhif.Supplied
The Ghosts of Iraq’s Marshes by Steve Lonergan and Jassim al-Asadi tells the history of the creation, destruction, and revitalization of the Mesopotamian Marshes over the past 50 years. The book follows al-Asadi, an Iraqi irrigation engineer who was jailed and tortured under Saddam Hussein and who then dedicated his life to the reflooding and restoration of the Marshes, an ecosystem that has been around for thousands of years and which remains vital to the biodiversity of the planet. Al-Asadi’s work eventually led to the Marshes being declared a UNESCO World Heritage site. His co-author Lonergan is professor emeritus in the department of geography at the University of Victoria and from 2006 to 2010 led the Canadian-Iraq Marshlands Initiative, which was funded by the Canadian government.
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The common perception of the Middle East by those living in the Western Hemisphere is a land of deserts, oil, and Islam. And yet, in a part of the Middle East once known as Mesopotamia, there are two great rivers: the Tigris and the Euphrates. These two rivers wind their way south from southern Turkey through Syria and Iraq, rather like unruly neighboring strands of a man’s long beard, until they meet and form the Shatt al-Arab River in southern Iraq, which then flows through the city of Basra and out into the Gulf. Just north of their confluence, the rivers would often flood their banks to form a large area of connected wetlands in Iraq and Iran known as the Mesopotamian Marshlands.
The Mesopotamian Marshlands were once among the largest wetlands in the world, covering an area of more than 10,500 square kilometers, roughly the size of Lebanon and larger than twenty-seven countries in the world. During times of extreme floods, the wetlands could extend to 20,000 square kilometers.
They supported a diverse range of flora and fauna and housed a human population estimated between 500,000 and 750,000 by the mid-twentieth century. The region is part of the Fertile Crescent, a semi-circular cultural and ecological land bridge that ranges from Egypt to Syria to the Gulf.
The southernmost section of the Fertile Crescent is also known as the cradle of civilization, where agriculture flourished, and modern culture began. A place where 6,000 years ago, writing, mathematics, metallurgy, and hydraulic engineering were invented, and city-states formed. The most important natural resource that fueled the growth and development of southern Mesopotamia was not oil, but water.
The portion of the wetlands lying within Iraq is often termed the Iraqi Marshes. The people living there are mostly Arabs, and the dominant religious group is Shi’a Islam. For centuries, people moved back and forth through the wetlands unfettered by any notion of national boundaries, and many residents continue to have strong ties to Iran.
Biblical scholars consider the Marshes to be the site of the Garden of Eden. The great cities of Ur, where Abraham was born, and Uruk, the largest city in the world in 3200 BCE, were on the Euphrates River and the edge of the Marshes. The two most important religious centers for Shi’a Muslims, Najaf and Karbala, are close by. Indeed, it would be difficult to overstate the cultural, historical, and ecological uniqueness of the region.
The people of the Marshes lived in huts made of reeds. Reed stalks framed the structures, and woven reeds formed their roofs and walls, along with the mats people sat and slept on. Their livelihoods were based on fishing, hunting, and farming. Later, water buffalo were introduced, most likely from India. Marsh dwellers who tend to water buffalo are known as Ma’dan.
British explorer Wilfred Thesiger was one of the first travelers from the West to spend significant time in the Marshes. After living there on and off for seven years in the 1950s, he documented his experiences in The Marsh Arabs, published in 1964. The account of his exploits and stories about the people of the Marshes are familiar to a generation of geography students in the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, the Marshes remained remote, virtually inaccessible to outsiders, and all but forgotten by the West. The Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and the subsequent Gulf War and Shi’a Uprising in the early 1990s, all of which took place in and around the Marshes, further limited access to the area.
Thesiger was followed by friend and colleague Gavin Young, who spent time there in the 1960s and early 1970s. In his work Return to the Marshes (with photographs supplied by Nik Wheeler), Young provides an in-depth perspective on the Marshes and the people living there. In the last few paragraphs of the book, Young predicts a change coming to the Marshes and to the way of life that had remained unchanged for thousands of years. In this, he was prescient.
Thesiger and Young would likely be shocked to see how the region has been transformed in the past half-century. Wars fought in and around the Marshes altered the landscape and displaced thousands. Massive dam projects in Turkey reduced the flow of both the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and, in turn, the amount of water reaching the Marshes.
Large swaths of wetlands have been claimed for oil and agricultural development. The increasing magnitude and frequency of drought have had deleterious ecological and economic consequences. Most significantly, the purposeful draining of large sections of the Marshes by the government of Iraq during the 1990s, ostensibly to reclaim land for agricultural development and promote economic modernization, almost destroyed the Marshes.
In the fall of 2001, a rather innocuous-sounding technical report was published by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in Nairobi, Kenya. “The Mesopotamian Marshlands: Demise of an Ecosystem” was authored by Hassan Partow, a UNEP employee based in Geneva.
It was a report that shocked the international environmental community. Using satellite imagery, Partow provided visual evidence of the extent of devastation in the marshlands. Although he acknowledged that upstream dams on the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers played a role, his main conclusion was that the purposeful draining of the marshlands by the Iraqi regime in the early 1990s resulted in the almost complete collapse of the ecosystem and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. The report concluded that urgent action was needed to protect the remaining wetlands.
The Iraqi government, unhappy with the contents of the report, lobbied UNEP to stop publication. It was to no avail, however, and publication went ahead. The world had its first glimpse into the disaster perpetrated by the Iraqi regime on the Marshes and its people. It stands as one of the greatest environmental and humanitarian catastrophes of the twentieth century.
Excerpted from The Ghosts of Iraq’s Marshes: A History of Conflict, Tragedy, and Restoration by Steve Lonergan and Jassim Al-Asadi. © 2024 by Steve Lonergan. All rights reserved. Published by the American University in Cairo Press. www.aucpress.com.