The marshes of southern Iraq, home to one of the world's oldest ways of life, are beginning to revive after five years of devastating drought, NPR's Jane Arraf and Fatima Al-Kassab reported from about 50 miles from the ancient site of Ur. Rain over the last year has brought water back to some of the wetlands, but not enough to ward off other threats.
The reporters traveled at sunrise in a long, narrow mashuf, a boat design used for thousands of years, past water buffalo, migratory birds and a mother wild boar with piglets darting into the reeds. Their guide was Jassim Al-Asadi, co-founder of the environmental group Nature Iraq, who was born in the marshes, "literally in a boat." Saddam Hussein drained the wetlands in the 1990s after an uprising in southern Iraq. After the United States toppled Saddam in 2003, Asadi, an engineer, played a key role in restoring them. Three years ago he was kidnapped and tortured by an Iran-backed militia that accused him of being an Israeli spy because he met with foreign journalists, NPR reported. When he was freed, he went back to the work.
Milk is up. The fish are not.
Herder Muammel Raad Waheed told Asadi he is getting twice as much milk from each buffalo as during the drought, when dead animals floated in the canals and families left with whatever livestock they had left. Some of those families are starting to come back. The future of the marshes, NPR noted, depends partly on the Iraqi government's water policies and those of Turkey and Syria, which share the rivers.
Fishermen told Asadi they are still suffering. "There is only a kind, not — a bad kind of the fish. And no one eat it here. It is not tasty and smaller," he said, describing sea fish that can live in more saline and polluted water. Without treatment plants, towns dump sewage directly into the marshes. Asadi showed NPR Nature Iraq's answer: a floating pumping station that draws Tigris water into a pond where reeds and other plants remove toxins.
A few miles away, workers were erecting a reed guesthouse, tying long stalks into the distinctive arches found in ancient Sumerian carvings, then breaking into song when the foundations went up. Life is much harder than it was, Arraf reported, but people are keeping traditions alive while they wait for a fuller recovery. The story is not a declaration that the crisis is over. It is a picture of a partial rebound, still boxed in by upstream dams, salt and sewage.