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Politics : Let's Talk About the War -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (57)	3/26/2003 5:28:10 PM
From: DMaA	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 486

It's mind boggling: Destroying the Marshes Since the Gulf war, Iraqi forces have dried and cleared most of Iraq's southern marshes in actions against the predominantly Shi'a Muslim Arabs living there. In the spring of 1991, a post-Gulf war Shi'a uprising engulfed much of southern Iraq. After Baghdad regained control of the major cities, some of the insurgents retreated to safe havens in the Al 'Amarah and Hawr al Hammar Marshes. Baghdad's strategy for dealing with this insurgency was to dry the southern wetlands through a large-scale water diversion project in an effort to remove the insurgents' cover and concealment. For more than 1,000 years, the marshes - roughly 5,200 square kilometers in area - provided all the necessities of life for tens of thousands of Arab marsh dwellers. During the Iran-Iraq war, the Iraqi military constructed causeways to move armored units and supplies more easily along the southern border area. This construction caused drying of the eastern third of the marshlands by the mid-to-late 1980s. After the 1991 Shi'a uprising, the Baghdad regime undertook an ambitious effort to dry the entire region. With the completion of an east-west dam and a north-south canal, the major water supply to Al 'Amarah Marsh was cut off. By the fall of 1993, very little standing water (less than 52 square kilometers) remained in the former marsh area and the marsh-drying program caused the evaporation of most surface water from the Hawr al Hammar and Al 'Amarah Marshes. The immediate effect of the loss of surface water was the widespread destruction of indigenous vegetation that required year-round standing water. usinfo.state.gov