The rivers and lakes that have nourished communities since the beginning of civilization are drying up as drought causes hunger, displacement and latent conflict.
Small groups of buffaloes were submerged in green, muddy waters. Its ridges rose to the surface like a chain of black islets, stretching down the Toos River, a tributary of the Tigris River that flows into the Huwaiza Swamps in southern Iraq.
With their melancholy eyes, they looked defiantly at an approaching boat, refusing to move. It wasn’t until the boatman shouted “hey, hey, hey” that one or two reluctantly raised their hips. Looking at the boat, they walked a few minutessteps away, leaving the boatmen slightly enough space to navigate among an organization of large, curved horns.
On the right bank of the river stood a cultural center built in the classic style of southern Iraq, with upper arches made of thick bundles of bound reeds. stopover in the swampy region since it was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016.
However, a few hundred meters after the cultural center, the boat’s engine sizzled, and its rear hit the dust as the river turned into a shallow swamp, where small herons and grebes stood in the water and managed to separate their sticks, like legs.
The foliage on both shores also disappeared, revealing a devastating scene: what two years earlier, a gigantic expanse of blue water, a lagoon teeming with wildlife, fish and home to gigantic herds of water buffalo, had become a flat desert where a few thorny bushes grew.
Under the scorching sun, the scorching wind threw tumbleweeds onto a parched yellow earth, marked with deep cracks and crumbling finely underfoot. On the ground rose piles of beds of dead reeds on which the inhabitants of the marshes had built their homes. Some relics from their previous lives were strewn out: damaged plastic buckets, rusty steel pipes, and a kettle.
The ruin of nearly 3,000 km2 (1,000 square miles) of this unique ecosystem is a small example of the unprecedented environmental disaster unfolding in Iraq. Rivers and lakes that had spawned farming communities since the beginning of civilization are drying up, the country’s water reserves are halving, while Iraq’s Ministry of Water Resources estimates that a quarter of Iraq’s new water will be lost in the next decade.
In and around Mosul province, considered Iraq’s breadbasket, two consecutive dry seasons have turned vast tracts of wheat and barley fields into drylands, resulting in the loss of nearly 90 percent of the recent peak harvest. Officials, this will continue until next season.
After canals and rivers dried up, farmers began digging wells, but unregulated groundwater use is causing a sharp drop in water quality and grades. In the southern region of Samawa, illegal drilling has led to the total disappearance of Lake Sawa.
Meanwhile, anomalous sandstorms hitting cities and eroding soil have a recurring occurrence due to drought and plant canopy loss: 40,000 hectares (100,000 acres) are lost due to desertification each year.
Drought displaces tens of thousands of people, forcing farmers to abandon their land and settle on the margins of major cities, settle in slums on the outskirts, deplete infrastructure that is already crumbling and cause further destruction of agricultural land and desertification. And in a country with a fragile security situation, plagued by heavily armed militias and flooded with weapons galore, the water festival and unregulated digging of wells are creating disputes that threaten to escalate into wider conflicts.
The reasons for these environmental errors are interdependent: emerging temperatures, record rainfall due to the climate crisis; Because of drastic discounts on the amount of water reaching Iraq from upstream countries, Turkey’s vast networks of dams on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers reduced Iraq’s share by 60%, while neighboring Iran diverted tributaries and other rivers. in the evaporation of water, contributing to the depletion of reservoirs.
According to the GEO-6 report published through the United Nations Environment Programme, Iraq is ranked as the fifth most vulnerable country in the world to declining water and food availability and excessive temperatures. The World Bank estimates that until 2050, average temperatures will rise. up to 2°C and precipitation will be minimized up to 9%.
Iraq’s population, which relies entirely on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, as well as other smaller rivers for irrigation, drinking and sanitation, has nearly doubled in the past two decades. However, in a country where corruption and mismanagement can turn a dire scenario into a catastrophic one, archaic irrigation strategies and depleted infrastructures that have not noticed waste of investment and contaminate the remaining water.
“It was on the edge of the swamps that human history in Iraq began. “So wrote British traveler Wilfred Thesiger, who lived among the Marsh Arabs, the Ma’dan, in the 1950s. At the time, it was imaginable to navigate the network of rivers, canals, and lagoons across the plains of southern Iraq, connecting the Tigris Marshes in the east with the central marshes of the Euphrates Delta in the west.
The unique ecosystem functioned as a heat-absorbing microclimate, with temperatures in the marshes up to 4°C lower than in neighboring areas, and the region is home to exceptional biodiversity. Then came industrialization and mass agriculture, followed by wars, culminating in Saddam’s attack on the swamps in the 1990s and now drought.
Throughout those decades, government officials, from the British colonial officer to Saddam’s Republican Guard, saw the dense marshes and dizzying maze of canals as a safe haven for warring central authority parties, from African slaves who rebelled in the ninth century to modern Islamist communists and rebels. as well as masses of army deserters who fled compulsory military service.
This view of the marshes as a harmful position and a hotbed of bandits contributed to city dwellers and rural farmers looking down on and despising marshland Arabs.
“The effect of climate replaces purposes as a magnifying glass of risk,” said Dr. Hassan al Janabi, a former water minister and environmental expert. “But this is necessarily a man-made disaster, of which the swamps are obviously the victims, due to a false impression of the unique climatic and cultural importance of the region. “
He added: “Its destruction is part of the city’s classic prejudice against the countryside, especially against other swampy people who have been discriminated against and insulted for raising buffalo.
“There are a lot of illegal rivers that divert water to the lands of other influential people who use them for fish farming or to irrigate their land. We lost 80% of the bison due to poor management.
Just north of Toos, which is meant to supply water to Huwaiza Marsh, a local activist pointed to two giant fish ponds and an illegally dug canal that diverts water to nearby farmland, all owned by a tough local tribal sheikh. Last month, even the Toos’ water thread had dried up.
A ministry in Baghdad determines the allocation of irrigation water to the province, with agriculture consuming the largest consistent percentage of water – nearly 65 consistent with percent. The severe drought has led to increased competition, in which the interests of weaker communities, such as swamp dwellers, are sacrificed to gain advantage from the powerful.
“This is a crime unfolding before our eyes,” Janabi said. “Swamps are the true ancient lineage of Mesopotamia, but those teams that have lived there for thousands of years see their way of life wiped out in favor of rice farmers, which doesn’t really have any economic effect since we import 95% of our rice. “
In Chibayish, the central swamp of the Euphrates basin, scenes of drought and devastation are repeated. What was once a vast network of swamps has now been reduced to a few remote ponds of stagnant brackish water, reeking of dead, highly polluted fish, sitting amid vast expanses of desert landscapes. The long, sublime fish-hulled boats that once plied those waters now rest on their sides, covered with a crust of salt and dry mud.
On the edge of one of those ponds, Abdul Sattar and his two sons took refuge from the oppressive heat in a small dust room, naked like two reed mats on the dirt floor. An old air freshener clattered out of the small window, bubbling with hot air.
The eldest son, a slender young man in his twenties, poured tea while Abdul pondered silently for a while when asked about the effects of drought. When he spoke, the words temporarily fell into a strong guttural accent. He said that in recent months, a dozen of his buffaloes had died and those that remained were too thin to sell. “If I slaughter them and sell them as meat, they will bring more,” he added, pulling the tattered edge of his stained, muddy plate.
At 40, his thin, tanned face, withered and battered by the harsh Iraqi sun, his feet covered in dust and cracked, looked askance at anyone arriving from the city. He said the buffaloes could not feed themselves because of the drought and depended on the fodder he provided.
“They used to faint and graze for a week or two on green reeds and other plants and only come back when they needed to be milked,” he said. “Now I have to feed them, everyone wants to share a ton of fodder. “A week, but I can separate it a bit. Mothers don’t even produce enough milk to feed their calves.
He looked at his youngest son across the room, a 12-year-old boy asleep under a blanket in a feeble attempt to hide from the buzzing flies, and said his circle of relatives is hungry, so he can feed the buffaloes to keep them alive, just that.
Buffaloes refuse to drink the highly polluted water, even when they locate small pools of dust in which to wallow. He pointed to the brackish yellow water jug in front of him and said he had to pass near the city to buy drinking water. He was divided between his circle of relatives and his buffaloes.
Previously, the swamps where their extended relatives raised their buffalo had dried up; than in 1994, after Saddam’s crusade to drain the swamps. He was then a young man and accompanied his circle of relatives as they moved north, locating a safe haven on the banks of the Tigris River south of Baghdad, and returned after the overthrow of the regimes, when the recovery of the marshes has become a political priority. “Reliving the marshes was the only thing they gave us after the [regime] change, and that’s not there anymore.
Outside the dust room, 3 emaciated-looking buffaloes were sitting in a small, dusty pond. A larger herd was nearby, in the shadow of a steel canopy. Abdul said that generation after generation, his tribe had lived with those buffaloes, so dear to them that they had been given individual names.
“These animals, they mean a lot to us, they are like a family. We suffer when we see them wither and die before our eyes,” he said. “I swear that if I knew how to do something else, I would, however, my father and I, and his father before him, still didn’t know anything about how to raise buffalo. “
Agriculture, which generates 3% of Iraq’s GDP, employs nearly a fifth of its workforce, tying other people to their land and helping maintain the canopy needed to mitigate the effects of sandstorms, soil erosion and global warming.
However, drought and the resulting crop failures are pushing thousands of families from their land – 20,000 since 2021, according to estimates by the International Organization for Migration – into big cities.
In a small community located under a viaduct north of the city of Basra, Karar lives with his circle of relatives in a small hut built of concrete blocks. Like its neighbors, its roof is made of plastic sheets and corrugated iron, immobilized through rocks and giant blocks. . A wide, deep ditch carries the community’s sewage, where garbage and plastic bottles are deposited in a dirty metallic green liquid.
As is the case for many farmers in Amara and Nasiriyah, who at the time constituted Iraq’s poorest population, the drought has turned their hardships into misery.
He said that a few years ago he learned that agriculture was dying in his village north of the Huwaiza swamp. Water levels were dropping and he had to use a diesel pump to irrigate his fields. water pumps. We were hungry,” he said.
So he sold the few animals he had (sheep and some buffalo) and moved to this neighborhood to make a living outside Basra’s burgeoning oil-based economy by working as a day laborer.
He said he was lucky enough to sell his farm animals and move in before the worst of the drought hit the area. “Now my brothers call me and tell me that we wish we would leave the land and come with you because now no one needs to buy our buffaloes because they are too thin. “
In Seeba, in the far south of Iraq, environmental disaster takes shape. Located on the western bank of Shatt al-Arab, the waterway formed by the junction of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, its orchards and fertile fields have been home to dense palm plantations for centuries. The water of Shatt al-Arab flows naturally through its canals, regulated by the high and low tide of the nearby Gulf.
During the war with Iran, Seeba became a front line and a battlefield. Trenches were dug, barbed cordon fields were extended, artillery and tank bombardments destroyed palm groves, and thousands of young Iraqi and Iranian infantrymen were killed there. However, after the end of After the War, other people returned and began to revive their land and eventually restored many of their palm groves.
“If you came here in the ’90s, you wouldn’t see Abadan,” said Ridha, a young local farmer, pointing to the gleaming towers of the Abadan refinery across the road. sail
But things began to change after 2004, when reduced water levels flowing from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers allowed Gulf seawater to penetrate deeper and deeper into the Shatt al-Arab, even though it all reached Basra for the first time in 2018, leading to a murky mass.
“Since 2009, Seeba has been a domain in crisis and most of our farmland has disappeared due to the catastrophic accumulation of salinity in the water,” a city official said.
The exact reasons for the drought in the north were reflected here, the official said. From the impact of global warming to Turkey’s relief in the volume of water flowing through the Tigris and Euphrates, Iran’s diversion of tributary rivers like the Karun. , and the discharge of uncooked sewage and chemicals from the oil industry into Shatt al-Arab. “Even the upstream provinces are taking Basra’s percentage of new water because of their population expansion. “
The high salinity of the water that flows naturally in the irrigation canals causes the death of the palm trees. “All water pumps on the banks have been cancelled and farmers are blocking their own canals,” the official said. “Now we pump water upstream through pipes. , or we buy it from trucks. In 2012, the state allocated the rebate to farmers who had not yet earned 10 years later.
A proposed mega-desalination allocation for Gulf seawater had stalled for years, with politicians in Baghdad and Basra accusing others of receiving bribes and commissions. “From a million palm trees in the 1970s, we now have fewer than 10,000. drip-based.
Ridha, tall, skinny, mustachioed and dressed in a black dishdasha with a red-checkered kufiya wrapped around his head, pointed to the palm trees in his orchard, named for the variety of their dates: “Khistawi, barhi, braim. . . But most of those valuable palm trees died from polluted water, wasting their crowns and long branches, and the tips of the trunks bent like a withered stump.
He gestured toward a canal zigzagging between the dead trees. “Water kills our palms,” he said. In the 1990s, we used to swim in those rivers, use the water for drinking and cooking, but now farmers block their irrigation canals to prevent poisonous water from entering their fields. maximum just leave the land and get government jobs with the police or Hashed [Shiite paramilitary units].
Ridha pointed to another scourge of the region’s environmental catastrophe, a giant herd of buffalo. As drought destroyed marsh habitat in the north, Ma’dan owners moved their herds here, settling them between fields and in now-dormant irrigation canals. They have a real risk for farmers.
Behind the banks of a wide irrigation canal filled with green water and covered with rows of decapitated palm trees, an organization of buffaloes sat submerged in a swamp.
Ridha looked at them and said that they were worse than the plague. “They are destroying the land,” he said. Their owners let them roam freely. They are heavy and break the earth, flood the domains and turn the farms into swamps. Sometimes they enter the orchards and feed on young palm trees; No fence can them.
The environmental collapse is exacerbating long-standing tensions between the well-armed Ma’dan and farmers. “If farmers shoot or kill a buffalo, the owners will come armed and start fighting, and we will fight them,” Ridha said. He said, “And now only the army can save us. “