WATER AT WAR 



Iraq's marshlands, once decimated 

 by Saddam Hussein's campaign 

 against his own people, 

 are reviving with global aid. 



By Azzam Alwash 



hen I was growing up in southern Iraq in 

 the 1960s, my family used to take me on 

 picnics to the Great Ziggurat temple and 

 the royal burial grounds of Ur, about 

 140 miles northwest of the Persian Gulf. 

 I remember the massive brick structures 

 jutting up from a stark landscape, in contrast to my verdant 

 hometown of Al-Hillah — once ancient Babylon — fed 

 by the Euphrates River. Little did I know that my desert 

 playground at Ur once sat on the shoreline of the Gulf, 

 at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The dry, 

 ashen dirt where I played had been the center of a bounti- 

 ful oasis where ancient kings had ruled and ancient priests 

 had appeased their gods, a place that often bears the title 

 "cradle of civilization": Mesopotamia. 



Five thousand years ago the entire region was lush, 

 fertile — an ideal birthplace for human civilization. Ar- 

 cheological studies published this year show that between 

 3000 B.C. and 2000 B.C. a concatenation of cities stretched 

 eastward from Mesopotamia all the way to modern-day 

 India and Pakistan. Yet the most extensive evidence of 

 urban evolution comes from the old riverbanks ot the 

 Tigris and Euphrates. Solid wheels were used, and perhaps 

 invented, there. Organized cultivation ol wheat and bar- 

 ley began on those marshy shores. The cities' inhabitants 

 developed a written language. And a distinct separation 

 between state and temple was recorded. 



By the time I was playing on the remnants of ancient Ur, 

 many environmental changes had taken place. Droughts, 

 changing river courses, and silting of the river outlets into 

 the Gulf had pushed the coastline southward and the gi- 

 ant rivers eastward. Yet the Tigris and Euphrates were still 

 infusing the land with life, a land said to have been the 

 biblical Eden. In the 1970s 8,000 square miles of wetlands 

 provided a home to hundreds of species of wildlife, as well as 

 to people — the Marsh Arabs, or Ma'adan — whose ancestors 



had been thriving in the watery environment for centuries. 

 Then the entire ecosystem crashed. 



The region's worst environmental disaster in the history 

 of human civilization took place in a single decade 

 of my adult life. In the middle of the Iran-Iraq war, 

 which lasted from 1980 until 1988, Saddam Hussein's 

 regime began using water as a weapon, and a weapon of 

 mass destruction at that. Supply roads were cut through 

 the marshes, and large tracts were dried and then reflooded 

 for strategic purposes, as Saddam's army blocked Iranian 

 advances and hunted political enemies and weapons 

 smugglers. But it was after the end of the first Gulf War 

 in 1991, when the Ma'adan rose up with other Shi'a Iraqis 

 against the regime (expecting U.S. help that never came), 

 that the assault on the marshes began in earnest. Saddam 

 Hussein's army dammed the rivers and dug extensive 

 canals to divert the water and drive out the insurgents. 

 The soldiers also contaminated the marshes with pesticides 

 and pulsed high-voltage electricity through the water to 

 kill whatever life might have remained. 



Before 1990, the Tigris and Euphrates brought 25,000 



NAT uu A i ins i oKY November 2007 



