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One of Saddam Hussein’s greatest acts of ecological destruction – the draining of the Mesopotamian marshes – has been reversed as birds and rivers return to the region

Saddam Hussein’s draining of the Mesopotamian marshes of Iraq – recorded as the Garden of Eden in the Bible – was one of the most infamous outrages of his regime, leaving a vast area of once-teeming river delta a dry, salt-encrusted desert, emptied of insects, birds and the people who lived on them.

But nearly two decades later the area is buzzing and twittering with life again after local people and a new breed of Iraqi conservationists have restored much of what was once the world’s third largest wetland to some of its former glory.

The story of this once almost impossible restoration is told in an exhibition of photographs that has opened in the UK. They show the huge expanses of reeds and open water – now at least half the size of the Florida Everglades – where plants, insects and fish have returned, creating a vast feeding area for migrating and breeding birds, including the majestic Sacred Ibis, the endemic Basrah Reed Warbler and the Iraq Babbler, along with most of the world’s population of Marbled Teal ducks, bee-eaters and many more.

"We call them stop-over sites, refuelling sites," said Richard Porter, Middle East advisor for the conservation group Birdlife International, who has helped train biologists and other experts for the local Birdlife partner Nature Iraq. "They are as important as the breeding and over-wintering grounds for species; if you have got to make a journey from central Africa to norther Europe and Asia, and you’ve got nothing to feed on, you’re stuffed."

The Mesopotamian marshes originally made up an area more than three times the size of Norfolk, where the exhibition is showing, in Holt. It sprawled across thousands of square kilometres of floodplain where the Euphrates and Tigris rivers divided into a network of tributaries meandering and pulsating south to the Arabian sea. They were home to more than 80 bird species, otters and long-fingered bats, and hundreds of thousands of Marsh Arabs who grew rice and dates, raised water buffalo, fished and built boats and homes from reeds.

In the early 1990s, this way of life came to an abrupt end when Hussein ordered the marshes to be drained to punish the local population for an uprising after his failed invasion of Kuwait, a problem exacerbated by the continued construction of dams upstream.

He ordered the area to be hemmed in by constructing around 4,000km of earthen walls that towered up to 7m above the unbroken flat landscape. The wetlands retreated to as little as 5-10% of their original size, according to a 2001 United Nations Environment Agency report.

After Hussein was toppled by American forces in 2003, Azzam Alwash returned from his adopted home in the US to the area, where he had lived for part of his childhood, and learned to hunt ducks with his father while they inspected the irrigation ditches. Alwash found the local people who had stayed had already begun to break up the walls with shovels or earth diggers, and they have continued to do so. They have destroyed up to 98% of the embankments, he told the Guardian, "not because they are tree-huggers or bird-lovers, but because it’s a source of economic income to them, because they can harvest reeds and sell them. They can fish and feed a family or sell them to earn extra income."

Alwash, a civil engineer, set up Nature Iraq and has organised training for graduates who help with monitoring work. "We take guards with us with Kalashnikovs, but the most difficult part is the road between [the capital] Baghdad to the marsh," said Alwash. "Once I’m inside the marshes it’s relatively safe."

About half the original marshland has been restored – even more had been reinstated, but there was a setback last year because of a drought. Nature Iraq has now drawn up a plan to cope with the diminishing water flows from dams upstream in Turkey by channelling irrigation water back into the rivers and building a barrage to retain meltwater from the mountains and create a "mechanical flood" of water to replicate the important pulses of freshwater that wash through the marshlands every spring.

Alwash and his team are also trying to tackle the problem of local poaching, although he has great sympathy with those who have few alternative sources of income, and hopes the opening of a new oil industry will help create jobs.

"We have done some work in trying to educate the locals," he added. "We say: ‘Go out and hunt but take less; make $10 today – you don’t have to make $20, and make $10 tomorrow’. We just keep at it. You can’t give up."

• The exhibition runs until July 25 at Birdscapes Gallery in Glandford, Norfolk

Paradise found: Water and life return to Iraq’s ‘Garden of Eden’ | Environment | The Guardian

Villages and rural areas have suffered a lot, the agriculture is collapsing or has collapsed in many places and  many people have moved to the cities to try to find work. Mostly there is no work to be found and what work they find is badly paid day labourer work. So they live in a squalid squatter camps and try to survive.

For those who stay life is almost as tough. The rural areas have been neglected for a very long time and lack basic infrastructure and facilities the most desperate need is for clean drinkable water. Even for those villages on riverbanks or with wells or streams the water situation is desperate. The water is untreated and so it is often contaminated with fertiliser or faecal organisms. But an added hardship is that the women and the children have to go to the ponds and the stream to fetch the water and then carry it back. I recently visited my mother who lives in a small village in a quite difficult to travel to part of Diwnaiyah. She decided this year that she was too frail to make the journey to the city where I live with my husband and children for a holiday. So her holiday this year is that my sisters and I have travelled to her and fixed things in the house and in her field where she grows her food.

I had forgotten how very very hard work it is to fetch and carry water.

I want to finish by saying a big "thank you!" to Erdla for fixing my English and getting the photos to look right.

Umm Fatima

Did you know that there are two dead seas in the Middle East? The photograph below was taken on the shores of Lake Sawa which is about 25 kilometres north of Samawah the capital of Al Muthanna Governorate.

If you look at the photo you can see that the shore is ringed with a crust of salt from evaporation. It’s a dead lake because evaporation makes the water so salty that fish can’t live in it. There is a local industry of salt collection and this is where my mother bought our salt from when I was a child. (I buy the salt my wife uses in our kitchen from the same family my mother did.).

I remember my parents took us here a few times for holidays. And I remember learning in school that there is no clear source for the water in the lake. It does not seem to be linked to any river and it is not some surviving part of a sea from before recorded history. In those geography lessons the teacher told us that this lake is very unusual because all the water is above ground level. The water is so salty that if the banks of the lake get broken in some place the flow of water and fast evaporation means that the banks repair themselves.

But what I remember best about this lake is my mother telling us to watch the birds very carefully and we would see a very strange thing. I remember watching them and seeing the birds land and they did not sink! They birds were walking on the surface of the lake as if it was ground! I remember mother laughing, I suppose at the expression on our faces. And telling us the story about Prophet Jesus the son of Mary (PBUH) walking on the water in Galilee and how the people in Palestine were oppressed by invaders from the west then, and how they are oppressed by invaders from the West now.

Mohammed Ibn Laith.

BAGHDAD, 6 May 2009 (IRIN) – The Iraqi government has earmarked US$30 million for water and education projects designed to help children in impoverished parts of Iraq’s southern marshland area, according to a senior aide to the minister of state for the marshlands.

The funding will allow the construction of 70 water purification plants and 48 schools, said Abbas al-Saidi, an adviser to Iraq’s minister of state for marshlands.

Al-Saidi said the projects would cover three southern provinces as follows: 16 water plants and 15 schools in Basra; 21 water plants and 16 schools in Maysan; and 33 water plants and 17 schools in Nassiriyah.

The ministry plans to spend $13.3 million on water plants and $16.6 million on schools. The tendering process should be done this month and all work completed by the end of 2010.

Though small in scale, the aid would be a step in the right direction for the marshland peoples who had been neglected “for decades”, he said.

“A major achievement”

The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on 4 May hailed the initiative as the first government investment to focus exclusively on improving children’s welfare in the area. “This is a major achievement by the government as it’s the first investment of its kind to target children – not only in Iraq but also globally,” Sikander Khan, a UNICEF representative in Iraq, said in a statement.

“This sets the standard and will be the beginning of a series of child-friendly investments… specifically improving their prospects of survival,” Khan added.

According to UNICEF, “some 34 percent of women in the Marshlands are illiterate, compared with 24 percent at the national level, and school enrolment in rural areas of the region is at least 30 percent lower than in urban areas. Around 81 percent of households are not connected to the general water network, compared with 26 percent at the national level with, in some villages, up to 99 percent of people relying on drinking water to be delivered by truck.”

Al-Saidi estimated the total marshland population at about 1.2 million, with about half a million living in rural areas.

UNICEF said the water projects were designed to serve around 250,000 people, including about 125,000 children, and around 12,000 children would benefit from the new schools.

Both al-Saidi and UNICEF spokesman Jaya Murthy told IRIN UNICEF was likely to add $6 million to the initiative – for the reconstruction of health centres, schools, and for school supplies.

“Painkillers”

The Iraqi government announced in March that it would build 5,000 houses for as many families in the marshlands, and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization has announced a $47 million scheme to develop the area.

However, Sheikh Mohammed al-Ebadi, who heads the Maysan provincial committee to revive the marshlands, sees all these moves as “mere painkillers”. What is being offered is not essential, and what is needed is much greater investment in roads, electricity and sewage networks, he said, adding that there was “no clear strategy”.

The marshlands suffered severe damage in the 1990s when former President Saddam Hussein diverted the Tigris and Euphrates rivers away from the marshes in retaliation for a failed uprising by Shia Muslims in the area.

In 2001 the UN Environment Programme reported that 90 percent of the marshlands had been lost, forcing some 300,000 inhabitants out of the area. Since 2003, efforts to restore the marshes have gradually revived the area, though reduced flows from the main rivers are causing problems.

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Source: IRIN