A dream of restoring Iraq's great marshes
Wetlands destroyed by Hussein could thrive again
Glen Martin, Chronicle Environment Writer
Monday, April 7, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle

URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/04/07/MN293104.DTL&type=science

There could be an unexpected beneficiary of the war in Iraq: the environment.

More specifically, the late, great Mesopotamian marshes -- a decade ago, the largest wetland by far in the Middle East, and a site considered by many religious scholars as the inspiration for the Garden of Eden in the Bible and Koran.

Located at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers near Basra, this vast watery substrate sprawled over 20,000 square kilometers, providing sustenance and shelter for a wide array of wildlife. They were also home to 200,000 "ma'dan," or marsh Arabs, a group of hunters and fishermen who trace their habitation of the region back five millennia.

The marsh Arabs lived in singular harmony with their watery environment, building elegant boats and elaborate houses out of reeds.

But Hussein considered the swamps a haven for Shiite opponents of his regime. So in the mid-1990s, he drained the marshes, broadcast pesticides to kill the fish and wildlife, and attacked the villages of the ma'dan. Today, the once verdant network of reed beds and waterways is mostly a sere and lifeless plain.

"It is just another example of the complete ruthlessness of the regime," said Azzam Alwash, an Iraqi exile and civil engineer. He is also a leading advocate for restoration of the marshes, and sits on the board of the Iraq Foundation, a nonprofit nongovernmental organization "working for democracy and human rights" in Iraq.

"Everyone is harping about Saddam's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction," said Alwash, "but here he used water as a mass destruction weapon. He used it to destroy a culture that has lasted 5,000 years. And I'm afraid it has made me somewhat cynical that the international community stood by and did nothing while it was happening."

The marshes were an integral part of the Iraqi culture and collective psyche, said Alwash, and their loss is an emotional blow that is hard for outsiders to understand.


A TREMENDOUS CATASTROPHE
Ecological scientists are in general accord with Alwash that the destruction of the marshes was a catastrophe of global significance.

"By any measure, this was one of the most important wetland systems in the world," said Scott McCreary, a principal and co-founder of Concur Inc., an East Bay consulting group that specializes in developing consensus solutions to natural resource conflicts. "It was on par with other great mega-deltas such as the Yangtze and the Amazon."

Concur convened a February conference on the marshes at UC Irvine. The attending scientists are expected to issue a paper on possible restoration strategies in the next few weeks.

The paper could well become a blueprint of great significance. If U.S. and British forces win the war as expected, some conservationists say it could provide a remarkable opportunity -- the chance to restore the natural splendor of the Mesopotamian marshes. If successful, such a project could be the greatest single wetland restoration in the history of the world.

"The end of the war could provide a genuine opportunity to do this," said Chris Lagan, the media director for The World Resources Institute. "It won't be easy. About 88 percent of the marsh has been depleted. There's a sense it will take a tremendous amount of effort, but it's not impossible."

Michelle Stevens, a professor of environmental studies at Sacramento State University and the manager of the Iraq Foundation's Eden Again Project, which is dedicated to restoring the marshes, acknowledged that the scale of the vision is somewhat daunting.

"It took 50 years to destroy 95 percent of the wetlands in California, but it took only about two years to obliterate the Mesopotamian marshes," Stevens said. "(Hussein) obliterated one of the biologically richest places on Earth, and destroyed a unique and ancient culture."

In the short term, Stevens said, scientists must do two things.

"First, we need to identify areas that are so toxic (from pesticides and salt accumulation) that it would be counterproductive to rehydrate them," she said.

Those planning for the marshes' restoration must also grapple with the fact that there's less water available in Iraq than there was 10 years ago.

"New hydro projects in Turkey, Syria and Iran have significantly reduced the flow down the Tigris and Euphrates," Stevens said, "and we're going to have to work with that."

Scientists are working on hydrologic models that reflect the current water availability, but Stevens said it's clear there will be "enough water to do a major restoration of some kind, one that will be worthwhile."


OTTERS, PELICANS, CATS, HERONS
Sizable segments of marsh remain near the Iran-Iraq border, she said, "and we think they contain some of the charismatic fauna the region was known for --

species like smooth-coated otters, Dalmatian pelicans, jungle cats, goliath herons and sacred ibis. With luck, we can re-establish them in restored areas."

Alwash said the reduced flows of the Euphrates and Tigris complicate any restoration scenario, but he maintains much can be accomplished with the water at hand.

"First, there is at least 45 billion cubic feet of recoverable water in the Tharthar Depression, a very large lake between the Euphrates and Tigris," said Alwash. "We can use that immediately to start rehydrating the marshes."

The canals Hussein used to drain the marshes -- The Mother of Battles River,

the Loyalty to the Leader Canal/Pipeline and the Third River -- can also be diverted to the marsh zone, Alwash said.

"Finally, we can make Turkey a stakeholder in the new Iraq," said Alwash. "Turkey desperately needs hard capital and Iraq will need new power capacity to rebuild. Iraq can buy power from Turkey's hydro projects on the Tigris, and use the extra water that will be released downstream for marsh restoration."

Pursuing these three strategies, Alwash said, "it should be possible to restore from one-half to two-thirds of the original marshes."

Suzie Alwash, the director of the Eden Again project and Azzam Alwash's wife, said the configuration of the restoration should be determined primarily by those who once lived there -- the marsh Arabs.

Since Hussein's initial persecutions, Alwash said, the ma'dan have been forced into a diaspora, some fleeing Iraq, others seeking anonymity in Basra and other Iraqi cities.


MARSH ARABS IN SAN DIEGO
"We're already working with a group of (marsh Arab) refugees in San Diego," said Alwash. "Ultimately we will have a stakeholders group that will tell us their priorities. The marsh can be managed in many different ways -- say for fisheries in one portion, migratory birds and other wildlife in another portion, and so on. The people who once called these marshes home will guide this."

Pegging the restoration to the needs of local people will be the key to success, other scientists agree.

The marshes were "a tremendous economic engine for the country," said Thomas L. Crisman, a professor of environmental engineering and the director of the Howard T. Odum Center for Wetlands at the University of Florida at Gainesville. "They not only supported the hundreds of thousands of people who lived there, but their fisheries provided much-needed protein to the populations of Basra and other cities."

While the marshes were a stunning ecological jewel, a repository of rare and endangered animals, Crisman said the key to resurrecting them is to emphasize their economic importance.

"The marshes were a critical component for the fisheries and water quality of the entire Persian Gulf," Crisman said. "Marshes act as filters and transport systems -- on one hand, turning contaminants into organic matter that fish, shrimp and other commercially important species can use, and on the other, dispersing that organic manner into surrounding aquatic systems."

Otters and the rest of the wildlife, Crisman said, "are incredibly important, but you won't necessarily be able to sell them to the World Bank. The World Bank does understand robust commercial fisheries, however."

The critical issue for restoration advocates, said Crisman, is to find the point where a revived marsh can be truly self-sustaining, from both the ecological and economic perspectives.

"We need to determine just how much of a wetland restoration you need to get a cultural restoration," he said. "What scale is critical? Frankly, we don't know. Which is why we have to get things going on the ground as soon as possible."

Bled dry, Marsh Arabs retaliate
By Paul Salopek
Tribune foreign correspondent
June 13, 2003

HAWR AL HAMMAR, Iraq -- It's 100 degrees at noon, the hour when the sky itself seems to melt into chrome-colored lakes--rippling pools that shimmer like mirrors in the vast salt pans of southern Iraq. These days, however, those liquid sheets of light are no mirage. They are real water--and one of the most poignant symbols of liberation since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

"This will bring back the fish, the birds and the animals," said Jawad Mutashir, a grizzled Marsh Arab who came to watch, for the pure joy of it, water from the Euphrates River gurgling back into the long-dead swamp that had been his ancestral home.

Bands of impoverished villagers upstream had cut the levees that Hussein built expressly to destroy Iraq's sprawling wetlands. Unshackled for the first time in years, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were now refilling thousands of acres of dry marsh.

"Thanks be to Allah for giving our water back!" declared grinning old Mutashir, one of thousands of nomads displaced by Hussein's cataclysmic reclamation projects. His dingy robes flapping about him, he hugged himself with his scrawny arms and added, "Thanks be to George Bush!"

More than two months after Baghdad fell to coalition troops, an extraordinary act of cultural defiance is unfolding almost unnoticed on the burning plains of southern Iraq.

The last ragged remnants of one of this war-bruised nation's most persecuted minorities, the fabled Marsh Arab nomads, are breaking dams, dikes and levees in a haphazard bid to restore their homeland, a wetlands of global worth.

It is a desperate and even wrongheaded effort. Most of the vast Iraqi swamps drained by Hussein for military purposes are gone forever, and uncontrolled flooding could poison those left with soil salts.

But the quixotic gesture of the tribesmen isn't completely hopeless, because they enjoy the backing of a powerful if unlikely friend: the Bush administration, which few environmentalists view as an ally.

The U.S. government is considering plans to restore at least part of the Mesopotamian Marshes, a legendary swamp that once was the biggest in the Middle East, and a steaming wilderness that biblical scholars identify as the Garden of Eden.

Andrew Natsios, director of USAID, the government's international aid agency, has taken a personal interest in the issue.

The agency called last week for agricultural proposals that include the rehabilitation of Iraqi wetlands.

And a team of U.S. hydrologists and economists is to leave Washington to make a survey of the remote area later this month.

What the Americans will find isn't so much a challenging engineering project as a colossal crime scene, a wasteland monument to human cruelty and survival.

"The destruction of Iraq's marshes involved a genocide," said Emma Nicholson, a British parliamentarian whose group, Assisting Marsh Arabs and Refugees, has been trumpeting the plight of the region for years. "The best way I could describe it is an open-air Auschwitz."

The Iraqi regime's assault on the Mesopotamian Marshes is a well-documented tragedy, and it began with the Shiite rebellion against Hussein that erupted on the heels of the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

Paying a terrible price

The Marsh Arabs, a 5,000-year-old tribe of fishermen-hunters who lived on reed islands and paddled swamp waterways in elegant canoes, joined the revolt wholeheartedly, and when it failed they paid a terrible price.

Bombed, shot, imprisoned and poisoned by the regime--Iraqi helicopters reportedly dropped pesticides into marshland lakes to kill fish, a tribal staple--the Marsh Arabs' population in Iraq has dwindled from 250,000 to 40,000, human-rights groups say. Tens of thousands of the nomads now languish in Iranian refugee camps.

Their vast wetlands, crawling with deserters and rebels, fared no better.

According to the UN Environment Program, 7,000 square miles, or a staggering 93 percent, of the Mesopotamian Marshes were bled dry by Hussein's engineers between 1991 and 2000. Gone are the 1 billion migratory birds--flamingoes, storks, cranes--that used to stop over on flights between Asia and Africa.

Gone are the 500-pound fish that tribesmen used to haul to market in trucks. Vanished, too, probably, are endangered species such as the smooth-coated otter.

So thorough was the destruction, ranked by the UN as "one of the world's greatest environmental disasters," that coalition troops hardly knew they were driving across a former swamp larger than the Everglades when they invaded Iraq from Kuwait in March.

Marsh Arab villages still cling to some of those roads. They look like Arab villages anywhere, including the middle of the Sahara. The only clues to their aquatic origins lie in stately council houses, with cathedral-like spires, constructed entirely of bleached, rotting reeds.

"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 landscape that looks like the Utah Badlands. "We want to teach our children how to fish, how to move on the water again."

That may prove difficult for many remaining Marsh Arabs.

Lafta's sun-blasted village, a squalid outpost of mud huts near the town of Qalat Saleh, has been forcibly uprooted 15 times since 1983, when the Iraqi government pioneered marsh reclamation during the Iran-Iraq war. Its children, ignorant of the lusher world of dragonflies and egrets, splash in a murky agricultural canal. Today, the ex-nomads are wheat farmers. Poor ones.

"It will be difficult to go back to the marshes because there is no food there anymore," said Hussein Suaibir, 39, who grew up on the manmade reed islands that have existed in southern Iraq since the civilization of the Sumerians. "We only hope with the released water, life will get better and better."

Suaibir was floating in a looted Iraqi army raft in the recently flooded margins of Al-Howeiza marsh. It was the first time he had set foot in a boat in seven years. His crew--two young cousins in drooping turbans--slapped at the unaccustomed nuisance of mosquitoes. "Little Saddams," they called them.

Exploiting the chaos of postwar Iraq, the Marsh Arabs have punched holes through levees in all three of the country's southern swamps.

A new lake

An immense new lake has appeared northwest of the port city of Basra. The dusty moonscape around Nasiriyah also glitters with discharged water. And once-dead fields of reeds, burned and bulldozed by the Iraqi army, are sprouting again near the Iranian border. Eventually, they will form a green wall 15 feet high.

This tribal "monkey wrenching"--the environmentalists' term for acts of vandalism in defense of nature--was first picked up by orbiting satellites last month. When photos of the flooding were projected at a UN water conference in Geneva on May 23, startled scientists who had grappled with the tragedy of the Mesopotamian Marshes for years stood up and applauded.

Still, nobody is arguing that reviving one of the world's premier wetlands, even with Washington's help, is going to be easy.

It may not even be possible.

Soil salt a worry

"The soil around two of the three marsh areas may be too salty to really rehabilitate quickly," said Suzie Alwash, whose State Department-funded environmental group, the Eden Again Project, has written a report for USAID on marsh rehabilitation in Iraq.

"We've got to narrow our targets," said Alwash, a geologist at El Camino College in Torrance, Calif. "Subtract out the salty areas, agricultural areas, oil areas--yes, don't be naive--and you have maybe 25 percent of the marshlands left to recover."

But other researchers question even that modest goal.

Fears for future

They say that problems with soil salinity, the erosion of the Marsh Arabs' aquatic traditions, and competition with oil and farming pale against the Mesopotamian Marshes' single biggest enemy after Hussein: Turkey.

Turkey controls the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, which supply 100 percent of Iraq's water.

In a demonstration of its power, Turkish officials literally shut off the flow of the Euphrates for 29 days in 1990. Today, the government in Ankara is building an even bigger series of dams, called the Southeast Anatolia Project, which threatens to choke off the downstream flow further, skeptics say.

"To pour Iraq's precious water on the ground for marshes and tribespeople seems a pretty sentimental impulse in this rough environment," said Robert Giegengack, a Middle Eastern water expert at the University of Pennsylvania. "It's going to be a hard sell."

Giegengack and others argue that economic development, such as aquaculture, would strengthen the arguments for saving Eden.

U.S. aid officials remain guardedly optimistic.

The suffering of the Marsh Arabs, as one researcher noted, helped provide Washington a humanitarian justification for the war to topple Hussein.

"This is clearly a priority for us," said Ellen Yount, a spokeswoman at USAID. "Our first job will be to just go see what's out there."

For the moment, then, the tribesmen will continue their unplanned reclamation project alone.

"We are like newborn children," said bearded Ali Hashem Jasim, 28, a Marsh Arab who was carting an old canoe toward Iraq's newly freed waters in a truck. "We are very, very happy."

He drove down an Iraqi military causeway that had been cut by local villagers. Out among the young reeds, under an ancient sun, were men in boats. All stood in their tattered robes and waved.