Saddam’s Legacy

At their peak, the marshlands were the largest wetland ecosystem in the Middle East, covering most of southern Iraq. The reed stalks protruding from the waters provided ample material for the construction of traditional reed houses — known as mudhif — as well as reed mats used for seating and sleeping. The abundance of fish in the marshes ensured that fishermen lived comfortable lives, while migratory and resident bird species were plentiful. Even lions and hyenas once roamed this unique habitat.

The marshes were home to around five hundred thousand people, primarily Marsh Arabs who follow Shia Islam. This ancient community is among the world’s oldest living cultures, with roots stretching back six thousand years to ancient Sumer, the earliest known civilization — which produced the world’s earliest known texts — and the Akkadian Empire, the first known empire of Mesopotamia. The cities of Ur, said to be the birthplace of the prophet Abraham, and Uruk, the largest city in the world in 3000 BCE, were located along the Euphrates River on the marshes’ edges.

While Marsh Arabs speak Arabic, their dialect incorporates words from the now extinct ancient languages of Sumerian and Akkadian. For centuries, their culture and livelihoods were intricately tied to the marshes’ natural landscape, with water serving as their most treasured resource, on which all other things depended.

The marshes themselves form a network of three major wetlands: the Hawizeh Marsh, which straddles Iraq and Iran, and the Central and Hammar marshes, alongside eight smaller marshes.

The ecosystem created a unique microclimate absorbing heat, with temperatures up to 39°F cooler than surrounding areas. It supported exceptional biodiversity, filtering out pollutants from the Tigris and Euphrates and protecting the Gulf coast from ecological degradation.

The marshes’ delicate balance, however, made them highly vulnerable to the vicissitudes of dry and wet years, desiccation, and flooding. In dry years, the wetlands fractured into isolated islands; in wet years, they formed one interconnected system. The terrain of mud, reeds, and water was nearly impassable, making it very difficult for any invading army to traverse or bring in horses. This natural advantage made it easy for the Marsh Arabs to wage guerrilla warfare and evade capture. For these reasons, conquering this region of southern Iraq was virtually impossible, according to Steve Lonergan and Jassim Al-Asadi, who together authored the book The Ghosts of Iraq’s Marshes.

But Saddam Hussein, who ruled Iraq from 1979 until his overthrow in 2003, would make it his mission to eradicate this unique ecosystem. The marshes had long provided refuge not just for the Marsh Arabs but also for communists and rebels fleeing the government. Eradicating the wetlands became a central element of Saddam’s campaign to crush resistance and exert control over the region.

Draining the Marshes

During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, when Saddam invaded neighboring Iran and plunged the region into an eight-year conflict, the marshes were transformed into a strategic battlefield. Water was drained from some areas, while others were intentionally flooded. Roads were built to allow for easy movement of heavy military equipment, bunkers were dug for advancing troops, and antitank and antipersonnel mines were buried throughout the region. These actions, according to Lonergan, a geography professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and leader of the Canada-Iraq Marshlands Initiative, wreaked havoc on the marshes’ delicate ecosystem.

The marshes were repurposed for the pursuit of war, leaving the environment devastated. During the Shia uprising of 1991, which lasted from March to October, the Iraqi army killed thousands of Shia Marsh Arabs. Many of those who participated in the uprising fled deep into the marshes to escape the army.

In 1992, Saddam set out to exact revenge on the deserters and rebellious elements in the marshes, which then spanned an area of twenty thousand square kilometers. Using a drainage plan devised by the British in the 1950s to convert the marshes for agricultural use, Saddam’s administration began systematically eliminating the wetlands.

Canals and embankments were constructed to divert water from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers away from the marshes. Simultaneously, the Iraqi army burned down and bulldozed thousands of villages and farms throughout the region, causing many residents to flee.

According to Lonergan, one of the government’s key projects in this effort was the Prosperity River, a two-kilometer-wide canal just over fifty kilometers long that paralleled the Tigris River. Its sole purpose was to transport water away from the marshes. Another canal, known as the Mother of All Battles River — or Umm al-Ma’arik — was constructed for the same purpose along the Euphrates. Any water that would potentially flow from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers into the marshes was diverted into these canals.

Within months, the marshes began to dry up. More than 90 percent of the wetlands vanished by 2000. Only the Hawizeh Marsh, sustained by water flowing from Iran, remained intact. The environmental devastation triggered a mass exodus of Marsh Arabs. Fish stocks were depleted, buffalo perished without reeds to eat or water to drink, and a way of life sustained for millennia was all but destroyed.

Marsh Refugees

The diversion of water also cut off supply to Chibayish, a town in the Central Marshes. The population of Chibayish declined from sixty-three thousand in 1990 to just five thousand in less than a decade. A 2003 United Nations report estimated that only ten thousand Marsh Arabs remained in the marshes, with fewer than 10 percent able to sustain their traditional way of life.

An estimated one to two hundred thousand Marsh Arabs were internally displaced, many migrating to central Iraq, to cities such as Hilla, Samarra, Fallujah, and Balad. Up to one hundred thousand are believed to have fled the country as refugees, some to Western countries, while more than forty thousand fled into neighboring Iran. Nearly the entire population of Marsh Arabs was forcibly displaced.

Within a decade, the marshes had been reduced to barren land and the livelihood of the Ma’dan was gone. “Most of the buffalo died and those that stayed alive were sold,” says Al-Asadi, an environmental activist and director of Nature Iraq, the country’s first and only conservation group. Asadi was born in the Central Marshes and has dedicated most of his life to their restoration. “Other families kept just six or seven of their buffalos and migrated to wetland areas in other parts of Iraq.”

Omarah was one of the many Ma’dan who fled in search of water. He and his family settled beside the Prosperity River, following the path of the water diverted from the marshes. The destruction of the marsh environment and the Ma’dan way of life led the UN Refugee Agency to classify the displaced as environmental refugees. International observers have also suggested that Saddam’s draining of the marshes constitutes ecocide for the purpose of genocide.

The disaster perpetrated by the Iraqi government on the marshes and its people “stands as one of the greatest environmental and humanitarian catastrophes of the 20th century,” Lonergan says. For more than a decade, the marshes remained a state-sanctioned desert, stripped of the biodiversity and life that had sustained them for millennia.

Hope Drowned

In late March 2003, a coalition of US, British, Australian, and Polish forces invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam’s government. The country descended into chaos. With the police force in disarray, crime and corruption spread. Long-suppressed tribal, regional, and religious tensions boiled over, and anger toward the occupying forces grew from protests to violence. Government ministries shut down, their buildings badly damaged in the bombings.

But within this chaos, the Marsh Arabs saw a glimmer of hope.

Less than a month into the US-led invasion, on April 10, a group of young men brandishing pickaxes and small water pumps demolished the dams and embankments that blocked water flow into Abu Zareg, a small marsh that was once part of the larger Central Marsh. Word of their spontaneous efforts spread, and others in and around the marshes joined, taking advantage of Saddam’s overthrow to reflood the wetlands. Asadi was closely involved in these efforts and convinced the ministry of water resources to assist in dismantling some of the larger dams and embankments that required more heavy equipment.

“The water from Tigris and Euphrates started flowing back to the marshes,” Asadi tells me, smiling. “And life in the marshes returned. Week after week, month after month, word spread and people began migrating back to the marshes.” Traditional economic activities, such as fishing, reed mat manufacturing, buffalo breeding, and making buffalo cheese and yogurt, returned after the marshes were reflooded.

Through these mostly local initiatives, residents restored about 70 percent of the marshes that were drained more than a decade before. Despite social disorder escalating throughout the rest of the country, it was a hopeful time for the Marsh Arabs.

Omarah was among those who returned to the marshes. He purchased twenty water buffalo and softly leaned back into his traditional life. “The grass grew and it became plentiful and healthy — more than enough for the buffalo,” he tells me, sitting on a reed mat in a small concrete room at his homestead. His children shyly peek into the room from outside, giggling and scampering away each time they meet my gaze. “And the water reached all the way to the main road.”

But that initial hope has since faded. Omarah gestures outside, where cars are barreling down a paved road, flanked by desertified earth, where only small puddles of polluted water remain.

“During Saddam, there was enough water in the Tigris and Euphrates, but the problem was his decision to drain water from the marshes,” explains Asadi, sitting on a couch at his home in Chibayish. “Now there is no Saddam, but we are facing a shortage of water in the Tigris and Euphrates because of [upstream] damming, along with issues in distribution and management of the water. Most of it is allocated to agricultural lands and very little ends up in the marshes.”

Climate Change and Crisis

Recurrent and prolonged droughts due to climate change have wreaked havoc on the marshes. There have been four major droughts since 2009, and their severity has been greater than in years past. The frequency of drought in the region continues to increase and poses an existential threat to the ecosystem. The prolonged drought that began in 2021, still ongoing, has been the most devastating, according to Asadi. The United Nations reported that in 2023, Iraq faced its worst drought in forty years.

The United Nations has identified Iraq as one of the countries most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change due to a combination of high temperatures, lack of rain, drought and water scarcity, and frequent sand and dust storms. Rain is becoming rarer and rarer, while temperatures soar. Iraq has recorded some of the world’s hottest temperatures — reaching as high as 123°F last summer — in its southern cities.

The dramatic reduction of water from upstream damming in Turkey, Syria, and Iran has intensified the impacts of these droughts, which have reached far outside the marshes to affect the entire southern region of Iraq. Turkey’s extensive dam networks on the Tigris and Euphrates have cut Iraq’s share of water by 60 percent, while nearby Iran has diverted tributaries and other rivers. The temperature rise is also causing an increase in water evaporation, contributing to the depletion of reservoirs.

Naturally, when wet years brought flooding into the marshes from the Tigris and Euphrates, the marshes were cleansed of salts. Now, however, this natural flooding no longer occurs, resulting in a buildup of salts in the water, negatively affecting the productivity of both plants and animals. The marshes, once interconnected, now exist as isolated systems, struggling to survive independently.

“The result of this is that the remaining water [reaching the marshes] has very high salinity,” says Najah Hussain, a lecturer of ecology at Iraq’s University of Basra who specializes in the southern marshes. “We can no longer even classify it as freshwater. It is a mix of fresh and saltwater.” As the marshes dry out, the high concentration of salt in the water kills the buffaloes — along with the fish and plants. “Issues around the quantity and quality of water reaching the marshes has affected the entire habitat,” Hussain tells me.

Threatened by Drought and Politics

Omarah’s initial excitement at returning to the marshes has since transformed into anxiety about the future. Since 2021, half of Omarah’s water buffalo have died from illnesses caused by drinking the salty water. Unable to afford fodder for the rest, he sold them off and now owns none.

“When you lose your water buffalo, you are losing a huge part of your life and identity,” Omarah tells me, expressing the unique relationship the Marsh Arabs have with their buffalo. “I have been breeding buffalo for generations and I always thought I would have passed that down to my sons. If I knew how to do anything else, I would, but my whole life I have known nothing except how to raise buffaloes.”

According to Asadi, these days the marshes cannot depend on the natural flow of water from the Tigris and Euphrates. Sustaining them now depends on alternative sources of water. The marshes are no longer provided for by natural systems. Whether water reaches the marshes or not depends on centralized decisions made by Iraqi officials at the ministry of water resources, which creates its own set of challenges.

This ministry in Baghdad determines the allocation of water for irrigation to each province, with agriculture consuming the largest share of water — nearly 65 percent. The severe droughts have led to an increase in competition, in which the interests of weaker communities, such as the marsh dwellers, are sacrificed in the interests of more powerful ones.

“The priority in Iraq is first the drinking water, then agriculture and oil, and only when there is some water left over do they release it to the marshes,” Asadi explains. “It is not the top priority for the administration.”

“There are some engineers working in the ministries that believe the marshes are solely for flooding and can deter flooding of towns,” he continues. “But they do not see that the marshes are also for the environment, the economy, and the culture of the indigenous people living here. They see it as a low area that they can dispel water into only if there is enough water. If there’s not enough, the marshes do not enter their minds.”

“Scared for the Future”

“I remember when there were hundreds of floating islands, which were built by the people themselves using old Sumerian techniques,” recounts Asadi, reminiscing of his childhood in the marshes. “The islands would move up and down with the water. Each family had at least three traditional boats, which we used to go to school and to the markets.”

“There was a peace and love between the locals and nature,” he continues. “All day, you could hear the singing of the women and men in the marshes who went out to collect the grass and reeds. This area had a much brighter face than it has now.”

Hopes of restoring this enchanting past, however, are sliding farther and farther away. The impacts of the recurrent droughts since 2021 have been calamitous. According to Asadi, around 33 percent of the water buffalo in the marshes have perished over the last four years, while 95 percent of the fish have died.

“Each time you lose a buffalo, it feels like you’re losing your children,” explains forty-year-old Fallah Gzigron, a water buffalo breeder and father of nine children, aged four to eighteen. “So it is very painful each time they die or I am forced to sell them.” Gzigron is sitting outside of his mudhif constructed beside a shallow canal that winds through the yellowish cracked earth.

Just months ago, this area of the Central Marsh was submerged in shallow water. But when it dried up, families abandoned it in search of water elsewhere. Some have since returned after the the Ministry of Water Resources dug a canal and constructed a pumping station between Basra and Chibayish, allowing a trickle of freshwater from the Tigris to reach the area. However, the flow is far below what it once was.

Gzigron has been forced to frequently mourn the deaths of his buffalo. A few years ago, he owned seventy. But he now has only fifteen remaining, with twenty-five dying recently due to poor water quality. Gzigron makes his living selling the buffalo milk to a merchant who transports it to the town to sell. Those who purchase the fresh milk make buffalo cheese and yogurt. There are no fresh reeds or grasses for the buffalo to eat, so Gzigron is now forced to purchase fodder to feed them.

“Yesterday, I bought fodder from the market for 160,000 Iraqi dinars [$122], and that will only last me for two or three days,” Gzigron tells me, as his young son milks a buffalo behind him, preparing the milk they will sell that day. “All the money I make from selling milk goes into buying the fodder for the buffalo to keep them alive.”

“I’m very scared for the future,” he continues. “If things get any worse we will be in a lot of trouble. The water is getting lower and lower. It’s hard to predict anything. I never know if next year the water will become even lower and the rest of my buffalo will die.”

Families in Dire Straits

Haidar Waheed Hashim, a thirty-year-old buffalo breeder and father of thirteen, is facing similar hardships. Malnutrition is plaguing his buffalo, drastically reducing their milk yield. “Usually, when I sell the milk, I should buy more buffalo and things for my family,” he says as his water buffalo grunt in the narrow canal beside him. “Now we are just losing year by year. Without water, there’s no life in the marshes.”

Ahmad Udey Jabar, also thirty, is a small merchant who purchases milk from the buffalo breeders and then sells it at the markets in Basra. Before 2023, Jabar says he would make 50,000 Iraqi dinar ($38) per day in profits. Now he makes just 25,000 dinar ($19) per day. The milk supply has plummeted — he used to collect more than 1,300 liters of milk per day but now gathers only 500 liters. “Even the quality of the milk has been affected due to the quality of the water the buffalo are drinking,” says Jabar, who has six small children.

The livelihoods of local fishermen have collapsed entirely. “Life now isn’t anything like it was before,” says Yasser Jeri, a forty-year-old fisherman and father of two daughters. He is sitting in his wooden boat in a waterway fed by the Euphrates River, throwing a net into the glassy water. “You can’t find any big fish in this water anymore, only small fish.” He gestures to a few small fish on the floor of his boat he caught that day.

“This is all I caught today, and I’ve been out here for a few hours,” he continues. “I won’t even sell this — it’s just for my family. In previous years, one fish could weigh around six kilograms, but the biggest one now is no more than a half a kilo.” Nowadays, Jeri says he typically catches one kilogram of small fish daily.

Lose the Marshes, Lose History

The future of Iraq’s Mesopotamian Marshes is bleak. Hussain says he is “pessimistic” about their survival.

I don’t think we can restore or maintain the marshes as they once were due to the shortages of water. We must choose certain areas of the marshes — around five thousand square kilometers — to look after and give them enough water to revive and maintain them as an example for future generations. But anything more than that doesn’t seem possible.

Asadi, who still dreams of the marshes he knew as a child, is more optimistic. He suggests that the Ministry of Water Resources could undertake projects such as constructing concrete and soil embankments to manage water flow and save the marshes. However, this would require making the marshes a national priority, backed by financial resources the ministry currently lacks.

Across Iraq, rivers and lakes are drying up, and the country’s water reserves have already been halved. The ministry of water resources estimates that one-quarter of Iraq’s fresh water will be lost in the next decade. Given this reality, it is hard to imagine the marshes becoming the government’s priority without serious international assistance.

“I will always have hope in the marshes,” Asadi says, stressing that their restoration should be of concern to the entire world. “The marshes are part of the culture of Iraq and are of historical significance to world civilization,” he tells me. “There are still aspects of Sumerian culture alive here. The mudhif is actually a Sumerian structure. So much of early civilization was born here in the marshes.”

“But if we lose the marshes, then we lose the people. They will migrate to the towns and year after year they will forget their culture and history, their stories and songs. If that happens, an entire culture that has existed for millennia will be completely lost.”