Problems with the Iraqi
Marshlands
and their Reclamation
On May 1, 2003, speaking from the deck of the USS Lincoln, President George W. Bush declared an end to combat hostilities in Iraq. After 43 days, the war that started with a ‘Shock and Awe’ attack on Baghdad in the early hours of March 19th, was over.
War damage, both combat and collateral, was relatively light. The looting that followed, especially in urban areas, caused far greater harm. The insurgency that came after the pillaging was worse yet. But it too was mostly confined to urban areas.
In terms of devastation, the greatest occurred in southern Iraq predated the war. It had occurred years before. There, Saddam Hussein, as president of Iraq, destroyed 90% of the 20,000 sq km of marshland (7,500 square miles—an area the size of the state of Massachusetts).
In 1991, following the Gulf War, the Marsh Arabs, known as Ma’dan, joined the failed Shi'ite uprising. While the revolt on dry land was easily crushed by Hussein's troops, the Ma’dan remained largely unreachable. This was how they had survived for thousands of years. Whenever enemies came, they destroyed small dams built to control the flow of the rivers and retreated deep within the marshes where, surrounded by water and near-impenetrable beds of reeds, they waited for their attackers to give up and leave.
But the 1990s were different. Iraqi forces pursued, strafing them from helicopter gunships, until the adoption of a southern ‘No Fly Zone’ in 1992. After that, heavy artillery and weapons of mass destruction, including chemical weapons such as napalm and phosphorous, were used to clear the villagers. The government instituted an economic blockade of the marshlands, denying all access to medicines and medical care. Often those who survived were removed at gunpoint.
They were accused of joining opposition parties and participating in anti-government activities. Frequently, there was no foundation for such charges and Marsh Arabs arriving at the Abu Ghraib prison seemed dazed and helpless. According to former Captain Al-Janabi, a former Iraqi intelligence officer, in one day alone, two thousand prisoners, mainly Marsh Arabs, were executed. The ex-captain says many were buried at a nearby cemetery in a special section where only numbers were used for identification. The bodies of others were returned to their families for burial.
Generally, the regime was reluctant to give bodies back as it disrupted the secrecy of its proceedings. Victims’ families expected executions to be preceded by lengthy court hearings and to be documented in public records. Such records never existed for those Ma’dan arbitrarily arrested and killed.
The UN special envoy reported to the United Nations in 1994 that Iraqi government forces were conducting systematic military actions against the Marsh Arabs, attacking towns, killing or wounding civilians, then destroying their farms and houses. According to the diplomat’s report, those who were arrested were blindfolded and abducted. Some of those arrested survived, albeit after undergoing horrific acts of torture lasting weeks or months; however, many were never heard from again. Rape was common.
Even after Hussein's army had quashed the revolt by slaughtering thousands of Ma’dan and attacking their villages, the Iraqi president was still bent on retribution. Under the guise of increasing agricultural acreage, he ordered the marshes drained.
To do this, he approved the construction of a massive network of canals, pipelines and dams. State-owned businesses and private firms were required to dispatch all their earth-moving equipment to work on the projects. Sunnis from Hussein's strongholds in central Iraq, including Tikrit and Fallujah, were encouraged to travel south to help.
The engineering feat was enormous—and remarkably successful. The Euphrates, which had flowed entirely into the southern half of the marshes, was diverted into a wide new canal called the Mother of All Battles River that stretched more than 100 miles around the former wetlands. Higher up the Euphrates, billions of gallons of water were redirected into a depression in the desert.
Environmentalists classified Saddam’s draining of the marshes as a major ecological disaster, broadly comparable in extent and rapidity to the drying of the Aral Sea. However, in Saddam’s case, the drainage was without any rational justification. What was left, after the land was drained, has been described as mostly desert with large salt-encrusted areas.
By 1999, according to the Brookings Institution, all but a handful of the 250,000 Marsh Arabs had been driven into exile or killed. The United Nations estimated in 2001 that “40,000 had made it into Iran as refugees, 20-40,000 still inhabited the remaining part of the marshes and 170,000 to 190,000 Marsh Arabs were either dead or displaced.”
In 1994, Joseph Dellapenna, a professor at Villanova University Law School and an expert on international water rights, said Saddam Hussein, besides his other crimes, is “ … also guilty of genocide against the Marsh Arabs.”
Dellapenna noted that Hussein had ostensibly drained the marshes for agricultural purposes but had done nothing to develop the reclaimed land, leaving it to turn into a barren and salt-covered desert. This, more than anything else, Dellapenna told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, revealed the true intentions of the Iraqi leader. "What makes this a crime under international law was its purpose," he said. "And I think the purpose was fairly clear, which was to destroy a culture and to destroy a people. And that's genocide. And genocide is an international crime. It's a crime against humanity."
Dellapenna said it was also an ecological crime, what he calls "ecocide," but noted there is no legal instrument under international law to prosecute anyone for the destruction of a unique ecological system.
In 2002, an analysis of Landsat satellite images showed the marshlands had shrunk 30% further, from 1084 square kilometers (418 square miles) in 2000 to 759 (293 square miles) in 2002. At this rate of loss, it was calculated that the marshes would vanish entirely within five years. In addition, in late 2002, Iraqi troops set fire to reeds on the Iraqi side of the al-Hawaizeh marsh (located along the Iraqi-Iranian border), possibly preparing for a renewed military assault on the last remaining Ma’dan villages.
In retrospect, it seems Saddam Hussein actually had three reasons for draining the marshes. First, was to improve military access to a remote border area which had been the scene of fierce fighting during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. Second, the Shi’as, encouraged by the United States, had openly rebelled against the government in 1991. Third, Baghdad had begun negotiations in 1992 with international oil companies who, in spite of international sanctions, were willing to do business with Saddam Hussein, in the development of new oil fields near the marshes.
Remarking on the new oil fields, Danielle Mitterrand, wife of the former French president, denounced the persecution and removal of the Marsh Arabs. She criticized the French, Chinese and Russian oil companies who were working with the Hussein regime to exploit oil in the southern marshes. She also lambasted the UN Security Council for passing puny resolutions that offered so little help. Mme. Mitterrand noted that while UNSCR 688 called for Iraq to “end its oppressive practices,” article VII of the same resolution stated, “… objectives should be realized with the Iraqi government’s cooperation.” As she pointed out, "It was unlikely that Saddam Hussein would comply with, or have reason to fear, the resolution."
In March, 1995, the European Parliament adopted a resolution deploring the drainage of the marshes and the attacks upon the marsh dwellers. This resolution specifically refuted the assertion made by Hussein’s government that the marshes were being drained for agricultural purposes and demanded that impartial observers be given a right of access to the marshes. Right of access was never granted.
Strangely, usually aggressive environmental groups took little public notice of the destruction of the marshes. When the war to oust Saddam Hussein started, Greenpeace International listed on its website as one of the five reasons for opposing the war that the conflict would “have devastating human and environmental consequences.”
However, new groups had been organized to help the Ma’dan refugees and to try to bring to a stop the continuing destruction of the marshlands.
The first to become directly involved with the plight of the Sh’ia living in the marshes was Assisting Marsh Arabs and Refugees (AMAR), a British nonprofit organization founded in 1991 by Baroness Emma Nicholson. The baroness was at the time a Conservative member of the British Parliament. (She later became a British member of the European Parliament.) Within a few years, AMAR had built a structure to help support the 95,000 Marsh Arabs who had taken refuge in Iran, providing them with basic health care, clean water and essential education services. Also, during the years of Saddam’s rule, AMAR monitored the difficulties facing the 30,000 Marsh Arabs being steadily squeezed into the shrinking remnant of the al-Hawaizeh marsh and attempted to publicize the inhumane actions of the Iraqi government.
In that same year, 1991, the Iraq Foundation, an American 501(C)3 non-profit corporation, was established in the United States by and for Marsh Arab expatriates. In 2003, Mr. and Mrs. Azzam Alwash, board members of the Iraq Foundation, working with the US State Department, set up a program named ‘Eden Again Project’ to assist those expats who wanted to return to their homes in the reclaimed marshlands. As set up, the project envisioned the marshlands being restored in their entirety.
In the spring of 2003, while the war was still in progress, the reflooding of the marshes got some inadvertent help from the Iraqi Army. Responding to Saddam’s orders to destroy roads in the area in an attempt to prevent British forces from reaching Basra, Iraqi troops accidentally blew up one of his dams. As a result, 25 square kilometers of drained marshland were immediately reflooded. The destruction of that dam inspired Marsh Arabs to start destroying other dams and dykes themselves, so that a sizable area was reflooded by the end of the war.
Afterwards, Iraqi state irrigation engineers, returning to work under Coalition Authority, further helped revive the marshlands by opening the gates of one dam on the Euphrates and smashing some of the bulwarks that had diverted much of that river’s water into The Mother of All Battles River. On its side of the border, Iran helped by opening a dam to assist in the reflooding.
In the summer of 2003, Baroness Nicholson said an organized effort was needed to get heavy earth-moving equipment to fully disassemble the network of canals, pipelines and dams built to drain the marshes. She urged the United States to help.
The US State Department had already made a decision in 2002, before the war started, that if the opportunity occurred, they would do their best to assist the Marsh Arabs recover the marsh and their way of life. After the war ended, the State Department gave USAID, the overseas aid department of the US government, the task of making plans to help the Marsh Arabs.
A mission comprised of US scientists visited the marshlands in July and August of 2003, to sample the earth, water and air to see what help was needed. One of the questions that arose was how to reflood the land so as not to damage its chance for a full recovery.
Some US scientists, advising the US State Department, concluded the marshes were already beyond help and suggested that regeneration efforts would only make the ecological situation worse.
Pekka Haavisto, chairman of the Iraq Task Force of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), said completely reconstituting Iraq's marshes would require enormous supplies of water. This was because the drained wetlands not only had to be reflooded, but first flushed clean of thick encrustations of salt that were left behind when their waters evaporated, else the result would not be a reclaimed marshland but a wasteland of lifeless salt ponds instead.
However, finding the required amounts of water would not be easy. The only sources were the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which had originally formed the marshlands. But those rivers no longer had the flow they once had because countries upstream built dams to harness the water for electricity and irrigation. For example, the flow of the Euphrates at Nasiriyah, which had measured 106,000 gallons per second before 1991, was down to 21,000 gallons per second because of new dams and irrigation canals built over the past decade.
The essential point for a restoration of any sizable part of the marshlands was the need for a basin-wide plan which would involve not only Iraq but also the other riparian countries drawing water from the Tigris and Euphrates: Turkey and Syria.
Fully reviving Iraq's marshes will require convincing Ankara and Damascus to release more water to Baghdad at the expense of development projects in their own countries. But the prospects of either state doing so are not good. Iraq, Syria, and Turkey already have a decades-long history of arguing over how to share regional waters. Reviving the marshlands will now become yet another chapter in that dispute. As Haavisto noted, there are few issues in the world as contentious as trans-boundary river problems and, in the Mideast, where water is a precious commodity, they are particularly thorny. "People who have experience with trans-boundary river problems are not too optimistic that these water-flow issues can be solved with the neighboring countries so the marshes could be refilled totally again. The most optimistic figure that I have heard would be around 30 percent recovery of the marshes."
Abandoned Ma’dan villages located in drained marshes look like Arab villages in any desert, including the middle of the Sahara. The only clues to their aquatic origins lie in crumbling, once-stately council houses, with cathedral-like spires, constructed entirely of bundles of reeds, now rotting.
"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 bleak landscape. "We want to teach our children how to fish, how to move on the water again."
On March 20, 2004 the Maysan Marsh Arab Council held its founding conference in Al Amarah to discuss the rehabilitation of Iraq’s marshlands. The council’s goal was to give the Ma’dan in Maysan Province a voice so their interests and concerns would be factored into the national and international plans that affect the marshes. One of the major issues raised was the allocation of whatever arable lands were reclaimed.
Ma’dan expatriates are returning to their ancestral lands, but those returning don’t have the resources to control the water or halt the pollution. Their health has been damaged by lack of clean drinking water and discharges of untreated sewage into rivers that feed the marshland. Some have called the rising floodwater an environmental disaster and accuse American and Iraqi officials of using them as political tools. "I don't see any of the politicians coming to live in the marshes,” said one Marsh Arab.
"The draining of the marshes was a symbol of Saddam's misrule, now everyone wants to be the hero who brings the water back," said Dr. Ali Nassar, the director of AMAR, the organization working closely with extant Marsh Arab communities.
Of the 200,000 people displaced, only a few thousand of the poorest have returned, mostly from the slums outside Baghdad and other cities. For Faleh, a tribesman who lives with his family in a little reed hut on an island measuring ten yards by four, there is a simple reason why his kin don't want to return. Life in the marshland is harsh.
"It's all very well to idealize the simple life of the marshes, but Westerners forget that marsh children died of swamp fever and malaria," a tribal chieftain near Basra said. "For some people, it's better to live on dry land with electricity in houses that aren't regularly flooded, near roads that take you to the city in less than an hour. The marshes were romantic, but we paid a heavy price."
Some scientists are worried that the hasty reflooding may have already caused serious ecological damage by sopping up large quantities of salt.
Arabs living in the marshes fear the Iraqi provisional administration, after bringing back the waters, will now conveniently forget about them.
While doubts have been raised about the Iraqi transitional government, there are positive signs. The new environment ministry and Center for Restoration of the Iraqi Marshes are taking control of the project with enthusiasm. One member of the team will be Toronto-educated nuclear scientist Hussein Shahristani, who turned down the job of Iraqi Prime Minister to accept a role as Director of the Iraq Academy of Science.
No one denies the problems are formidable. "The good news is that up to 35 per cent of the marshes have come back through haphazard efforts," Barry Warner of the Canadian International Development Agency says. "But the real question is, What is their long-term viability?"
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