"Thanks be to Allah for giving our water back!" declared grinning old Mutashir, one of thousands of nomads displaced by Hussein's cataclysmic reclamation projects. His dingy robes flapping about him, he hugged himself with his scrawny arms and added, "Thanks be to George Bush!"
Bled dry, Marsh Arabs retaliate
By Paul Salopek
Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent
June 13, 2003
HAWR AL HAMMAR, Iraq -- It's 100 degrees at noon, the hour when the sky itself seems to melt into chrome-colored lakes--rippling pools that shimmer like mirrors in the vast salt pans of southern Iraq. These days, however, those liquid sheets of light are no mirage. They are real water--and one of the most poignant symbols of liberation since the fall of Saddam Hussein.
"This will bring back the fish, the birds and the animals," said Jawad Mutashir, a grizzled Marsh Arab who came to watch, for the pure joy of it, water from the Euphrates River gurgling back into the long-dead swamp that had been his ancestral home.
Bands of impoverished villagers upstream had cut the levees that Hussein built expressly to destroy Iraq's sprawling wetlands. Unshackled for the first time in years, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were now refilling thousands of acres of dry marsh.
"Thanks be to Allah for giving our water back!" declared grinning old Mutashir, one of thousands of nomads displaced by Hussein's cataclysmic reclamation projects. His dingy robes flapping about him, he hugged himself with his scrawny arms and added, "Thanks be to George Bush!"
More than two months after Baghdad fell to coalition troops, an extraordinary act of cultural defiance is unfolding almost unnoticed on the burning plains of southern Iraq.
The last ragged remnants of one of this war-bruised nation's most persecuted minorities, the fabled Marsh Arab nomads, are breaking dams, dikes and levees in a haphazard bid to restore their homeland, a wetlands of global worth.
It is a desperate and even wrongheaded effort. Most of the vast Iraqi swamps drained by Hussein for military purposes are gone forever, and uncontrolled flooding could poison those left with soil salts.
But the quixotic gesture of the tribesmen isn't completely hopeless, because they enjoy the backing of a powerful if unlikely friend: the Bush administration, which few environmentalists view as an ally.
The U.S. government is considering plans to restore at least part of the Mesopotamian Marshes, a legendary swamp that once was the biggest in the Middle East, and a steaming wilderness that biblical scholars identify as the Garden of Eden.
Andrew Natsios, director of USAID, the government's international aid agency, has taken a personal interest in the issue.
The agency called last week for agricultural proposals that include the rehabilitation of Iraqi wetlands.
And a team of U.S. hydrologists and economists is to leave Washington to make a survey of the remote area later this month.
What the Americans will find isn't so much a challenging engineering project as a colossal crime scene, a wasteland monument to human cruelty and survival.
"The destruction of Iraq's marshes involved a genocide," said Emma Nicholson, a British parliamentarian whose group, Assisting Marsh Arabs and Refugees, has been trumpeting the plight of the region for years. "The best way I could describe it is an open-air Auschwitz."
The Iraqi regime's assault on the Mesopotamian Marshes is a well-documented tragedy, and it began with the Shiite rebellion against Hussein that erupted on the heels of the 1991 Persian Gulf war.
Paying a terrible price
The Marsh Arabs, a 5,000-year-old tribe of fishermen-hunters who lived on reed islands and paddled swamp waterways in elegant canoes, joined the revolt wholeheartedly, and when it failed they paid a terrible price.
Bombed, shot, imprisoned and poisoned by the regime--Iraqi helicopters reportedly dropped pesticides into marshland lakes to kill fish, a tribal staple--the Marsh Arabs' population in Iraq has dwindled from 250,000 to 40,000, human-rights groups say. Tens of thousands of the nomads now languish in Iranian refugee camps.
Their vast wetlands, crawling with deserters and rebels, fared no better.
According to the UN Environment Program, 7,000 square miles, or a staggering 93 percent, of the Mesopotamian Marshes were bled dry by Hussein's engineers between 1991 and 2000. Gone are the 1 billion migratory birds--flamingoes, storks, cranes--that used to stop over on flights between Asia and Africa.
Gone are the 500-pound fish that tribesmen used to haul to market in trucks. Vanished, too, probably, are endangered species such as the smooth-coated otter.
So thorough was the destruction, ranked by the UN as "one of the world's greatest environmental disasters," that coalition troops hardly knew they were driving across a former swamp larger than the Everglades when they invaded Iraq from Kuwait in March.
Marsh Arab villages still cling to some of those roads. They look like Arab villages anywhere, including the middle of the Sahara. The only clues to their aquatic origins lie in stately council houses, with cathedral-like spires, constructed entirely of bleached, rotting reeds.
"We broke the dams when the Iraqi army left," said Qasim Shalgan Lafta, 58, a former fisherman whose village sits marooned, along with a few cracked canoes, in a landscape that looks like the Utah Badlands. "We want to teach our children how to fish, how to move on the water again."
That may prove difficult for many remaining Marsh Arabs.
Lafta's sun-blasted village, a squalid outpost of mud huts near the town of Qalat Saleh, has been forcibly uprooted 15 times since 1983, when the Iraqi government pioneered marsh reclamation during the Iran-Iraq war. Its children, ignorant of the lusher world of dragonflies and egrets, splash in a murky agricultural canal. Today, the ex-nomads are wheat farmers. Poor ones.
"It will be difficult to go back to the marshes because there is no food there anymore," said Hussein Suaibir, 39, who grew up on the manmade reed islands that have existed in southern Iraq since the civilization of the Sumerians. "We only hope with the released water, life will get better and better."
Suaibir was floating in a looted Iraqi army raft in the recently flooded margins of Al-Howeiza marsh. It was the first time he had set foot in a boat in seven years. His crew--two young cousins in drooping turbans--slapped at the unaccustomed nuisance of mosquitoes. "Little Saddams," they called them.
Exploiting the chaos of postwar Iraq, the Marsh Arabs have punched holes through levees in all three of the country's southern swamps.
A new lake
An immense new lake has appeared northwest of the port city of Basra. The dusty moonscape around Nasiriyah also glitters with discharged water. And once-dead fields of reeds, burned and bulldozed by the Iraqi army, are sprouting again near the Iranian border. Eventually, they will form a green wall 15 feet high.
This tribal "monkey wrenching"--the environmentalists' term for acts of vandalism in defense of nature--was first picked up by orbiting satellites last month. When photos of the flooding were projected at a UN water conference in Geneva on May 23, startled scientists who had grappled with the tragedy of the Mesopotamian Marshes for years stood up and applauded.
Still, nobody is arguing that reviving one of the world's premier wetlands, even with Washington's help, is going to be easy.
It may not even be possible.
Soil salt a worry
"The soil around two of the three marsh areas may be too salty to really rehabilitate quickly," said Suzie Alwash, whose State Department-funded environmental group, the Eden Again Project, has written a report for USAID on marsh rehabilitation in Iraq.
"We've got to narrow our targets," said Alwash, a geologist at El Camino College in Torrance, Calif. "Subtract out the salty areas, agricultural areas, oil areas--yes, don't be naive--and you have maybe 25 percent of the marshlands left to recover."
But other researchers question even that modest goal.
Fears for future
They say that problems with soil salinity, the erosion of the Marsh Arabs' aquatic traditions, and competition with oil and farming pale against the Mesopotamian Marshes' single biggest enemy after Hussein: Turkey.
Turkey controls the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, which supply 100 percent of Iraq's water.
In a demonstration of its power, Turkish officials literally shut off the flow of the Euphrates for 29 days in 1990. Today, the government in Ankara is building an even bigger series of dams, called the Southeast Anatolia Project, which threatens to choke off the downstream flow further, skeptics say.
"To pour Iraq's precious water on the ground for marshes and tribespeople seems a pretty sentimental impulse in this rough environment," said Robert Giegengack, a Middle Eastern water expert at the University of Pennsylvania. "It's going to be a hard sell."
Giegengack and others argue that economic development, such as aquaculture, would strengthen the arguments for saving Eden.
U.S. aid officials remain guardedly optimistic.
The suffering of the Marsh Arabs, as one researcher noted, helped provide Washington a humanitarian justification for the war to topple Hussein.
"This is clearly a priority for us," said Ellen Yount, a spokeswoman at USAID. "Our first job will be to just go see what's out there."
For the moment, then, the tribesmen will continue their unplanned reclamation project alone.
"We are like newborn children," said bearded Ali Hashem Jasim, 28, a Marsh Arab who was carting an old canoe toward Iraq's newly freed waters in a truck. "We are very, very happy."
He drove down an Iraqi military causeway that had been cut by local villagers. Out among the young reeds, under an ancient sun, were men in boats. All stood in their tattered robes and waved.
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