One of Iraq's Few Successes Since the U.S. Invasion Was Saving Its Ancient Marshes: Now They're In Peril Again

One of the few successes of the Iraqi governments since the fall of Saddam Hussein has been reversing one of his great crimes: the draining of the marshes of southern Iraq and the destruction of the unique water-born civilization which had survived there for thousands of years.

Now this achievement is in doubt. A prolonged and devastating drought, combined with the building of dams on the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Syria, Turkey and Iran, is reducing the water flow once again and the marshes risk disappearing, possibly forever.

Once double the size of the Everglades in Florida and home to 300,000 people, the marshes nearly vanished in the 1990s when they were drained by Saddam Hussein to stop them being used as hideouts by anti-government guerrillas. But as soon as the Iraqi dictator was toppled in 2003, the marsh people tore down the earth ramparts his engineers had built and water once again flowed into the lakes and reed beds.

The marshes revived surprisingly quickly as their people returned from the slums of Basra to rebuild their old villages, fish in the shallow lakes and tend their water buffalo.

The rebirth of the marshes, fed by the Tigris and Euphrates and close to the legendary site of the Garden of Eden, seemed to be one of the few undoubted successes of post-Saddam Hussein governments. By the end of 2006, more than half the marshlands had been restored. The success did not last.

Over the last two years the marsh people have once again seen the water which they need to survive become shallower and more brackish.

"A few years ago, the marshlands were green and full of reeds and papyrus but now they are almost dry," Abdul-Khadum Malik, the mayor of Chibaiesh town in the marshes near the city of Nassariyah, told the UN.

"If the situation continues like this, all life in the marshlands will quickly die out." He said that dozens of families were already leaving because they could not find fresh water to drink or fresh reeds for their cattle and buffalos to eat. The same pattern is being repeated across the marshes as thousands of people once again take flight.

The reason this time why the survival of the marshes and their inhabitants is threatened is that Turkey, Syria, Iran -- and to a lesser degree Iraq itself -- have been diverting water from the Tigris and Euphrates for agriculture and to use in cities. More dams have been built across the upper reaches of the rivers, on which the civilization of the Mesopotamian plain has always depended. That diversion of water has been exacerbated by a prolonged drought.

The Greater Zaab river, which flows out of the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, is one of the main tributaries of the Tigris, joining it just south of the city of Mosul.

At this time of year the Kurdish mountains should be white with snow and the hills and plains beginning to sprout green grass. Instead the lack of snow and rain means that the mountains are bare rock and fields and pastures lower down are a dusty brown. Annual rainfall in Iraq, as a whole, is down by 50 per cent in recent years.

The river should be hundreds of yards broad at the bridge at Kalak, between Mosul and Arbil. Now it is not the roaring torrent of earlier years but a placid stream. The reduced flow of the rivers in northern Iraq is reflected by the amount of water reaching marshes in the far south of the country. Osama Witwit, the head of the Reviving Marshlands Center in Nassariyah, the province in which half the marshes lie, says that the marshlands are getting about 42 cubic meters of water a second, down from March 2007 when they were getting about 250 cubic meters.

The lack of water is not the only problem. The quality of the water has deteriorated, contaminated upriver by sewage, high levels of salinity as well as pollution from pesticides and untreated industrial discharge. Two-thirds of the waste water and sewage produced by six million people in Baghdad goes untreated straight into the Tigris and Euphrates. Only one in five families outside Baghdad has access to functioning sewage facilities.