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Iraqi Marsh Arabs see lifeblood drain away By TIM RADFORD LONDON Sunday 20 May 2001 New pictures from space confirm that one of the world's most remarkable cultures the 5000-ear old civilisation of the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq, based on reeds could soon vanish. In 25 years, the fabled wetlands near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers have dwindled by 90 per cent.
The evidence comes from images donated by NASA, the United States space agency, to the United Nations environment program (UNEP). Because of drainage for irrigation and dams to provide water for a growing population, what had been 20,000 square kilometres of fertile marsh and waterway is now less than 2000 square kilometres.
The Marsh Arabs maintain a culture that dates back to Sumerian times. They navigate with vast canoe-shaped reed ships and build huge cathedral-like structures of reeds. In the past 100 years the Marsh Arabs have survived rule by Turkey, the British and successive Iraqi regimes.
The marshes began to dwindle when the Tigris and Euphrates became two of the most intensively dammed rivers in the world. This reduced the water flow to the marshes. After the Gulf War, the 500,000 Marsh Arabs came under pressure from Saddam Hussein's regime, which embarked on massive drainage schemes. Much of the landscape is now salt desert. All that remains is a small fringe of marsh on the border with Iran. A fifth of the local people are in refugee camps in Iran and most of the rest are displaced in Iraq.
The marshes are an important site for migrating birds. An estimated 40 species of waterfowl are at risk. Smooth-coated otters that prowled the marshes are thought to be extinct. The flow from the marshes provided nutrients to support fish-spawning grounds in the northern Gulf.
"This major ecological disaster, comparable to the drying up of the Aral Sea and the deforestation of large tracts of Amazonia, has gone virtually unreported until now," UNEP director Klaus Toepfer said.
UN chiefs are trying to persuade Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey to agree on a recovery plan. But the drying of the Iraqi marshes is only one part of a larger picture of the parching of central Asia, the Middle East and Saharan Africa.
- GUARDIAN
