Iraq’s Forgotten Marsh Arabs

In 1991 Saddam Hussein drained the marshlands of the Tigris and Euphrates to punish the people who lived there for participating in an uprising against his rule and to prevent opponents of his regime hiding in the marshes.

A unique ecosystem and a fertile wetland the size of Wales was destroyed, turned into desert.

Saddam expelled some quarter of a million people and devastated a way of life that was thousands of years old.  The UN called the destruction of the marshes one of the world’s greatest environmental disasters of the twentieth century.

A simple hut stands on narrow bank in the middle of the Al Hamaar marshes.  Its elegant archways of bent reeds are testimony to a design that dates back 5000 years, to the ancient civilization of Ur, birthplace of Abraham.  Inside the cool, shaded interior Jamil Kadhim Ateed kneels and chants his midday prayers.

As far as the eye can see around this hut, water sparkles under the blazing sun.  Men and women punt narrow, curved boats across the still surface.  New green reeds are sprouting everywhere. Water buffalo splash through the shallow waters, heading for the fresh grazing.  A glittering, turquoise kingfisher hovers above the shallows.  A little distance away a heron stands on one leg, its neck curved and waiting for a fish to swim by.

Jamil comes out to speak to me.  He has a white, neatly-trimmed beard, and he wears a traditional black and white chequered headscarf and clean white robe.

‘I feel happy,’ he says to me.  ‘The water is back.’

Jamil grew up near here.   He remembers the fish that teemed in the waters, the abundance of rice growing and the milk and meat from his cows and buffaloes.

But he and his family were driven out along with 250 000 other Marsh Arabs when Saddam Hussein drained the marshes in 1991.  They were forced into the slums of the city of Ramadhi, west of Baghdad, far away from their home, eking out a living from relatives and friends, trying to graze their cattle and sheep on rubbish dumps.

Saddam’s campaign was a deliberate attempt to destroy an entire culture.  Not only did he order huge artificial canals to be dug to drain the marshes, he systematically bombarded villages, and ordered thousands of arbitrary arrests.  Human rights groups documented widespread accounts of torture and disappearances.

In some ways, Jamil and his family were among the lucky ones.

They came back to live in the marshes only 3 months ago, after local irrigation officials brought in mechanical diggers and began to reflood the marshlands.  In some places, that only months ago were battlefields, Saddam’s artillery pieces and tanks lie silent and rusting as the waters rise around them.

The quiet peace of these marshes is such a contrast to the bombs and mayhem in Baghdad.  For Jamil and tens of thousands of other Marsh Arabs, the war has brought them the liberation George W. Bush promised all Iraqis.

‘Now,’ Jamil tells me.  ‘I am back together with my cousins and my brothers.  Before the war Saddam was fighting all the time.  The Americans did a good thing to kick Saddam out.  I feel free now.’

Further along the bank Jamil’s two wives, Jamila and Safeera, and five of his eleven children are taking shelter from the sun shimmering off the water.  They are sitting under a crude shelter made of reed mats and rusting corrugated iron.  A young calf sleeps on the straw that makes up the floor of their hut.

The women are dressed in the traditional black robes, while the children wear bright pink and scarlet clothes.  The younger girls wear colourful headscarves.  The children are shy, but the older women smile when I approach, and insist that I take their photograph.

It is a humble, even miserable dwelling; but it is the start of their new life.  Already they have fish to cook and fresh grazing for their livestock.  Just across the lake, one of Jamil’s older daughters poles a high-prowed canoe though the reeds.  It is made of wooden planks and the seams are waterproofed with sheep’s wool and bitumen – a method used by the ancient Assyrians.

‘I was born here, in 1929,’ Jamil says.  ‘My great grandfather told me he saw lions and hyenas in the marshes.  We used to hunt wild boar.  My family has been here for a long time, maybe 200 years or more.  I don’t like to be in the city,’ he adds.  ‘I like this place.

Not all the past can be recovered, though.  Nothing will ever be the same for Jamil and his family.  New dams in Syria and Turkey mean that there is not enough water to reflood the entire extent of the marshes; huge areas will remain dried out.

Many Marsh Arabs will never return.  The old way of life was hard.  Now people want schools and hospitals, and they are looking to the Americans and the new order to help them.  Many are demanding compensation for the damage they suffered under Saddam.

But something infinitely precious has been returned to people like Jamil and his family.  The continuity of memory has been restored.  Their place in the world has been given back to them.

He smiles at me through his white beard.  ‘The future will be better than things are now.  It will be a good life.’