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| Iraq | |
| Iraqi Engineers Revitalize Marshes That Hussein Had Drained | |
| 2003-10-11 | |
| EFL ZAYAD, Iraq — The surging water from the Euphrates River first quenched the desiccated soil around this village. Then, with a steady crescendo, it smothered farming tracts, inundated several homes and enveloped the landscape to the horizon. "Hamdulillah," intoned Salim Sherif Kerkush, the stout village sheik. Thank God.
Women clad in black head-to-toe abayas wade into the water to wash clothes. The mullet found in the murky depths, though small and bony, is grilled for dinner every night. Swamp grasses are cut to feed the cows and sheep that will eventually be traded for water buffalo. "Everyone is so happy," Kerkush said as he watched his son stand in a mashoof and steer it like a gondolier with a long wooden pole. "We are starting to live like we used to, not the way Saddam wanted us to live." Born in 1949, Kerkush remembers a childhood identical to those described by his father and his grandfather. It was, he believes, a way of life little changed since the days of the ancient Sumerians who lived near the marshes and were the first humans to practice irrigated farming. Although Hussein’s government built dams along the Tigris and Euphrates in the 1970s, and paved roads through the wetlands in the 1980s to move supplies to the front lines during the eight-year war with Iran, the marshlands remained largely intact. In 1990, an estimated 300,000 people lived there. Everything changed after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when Shiite Muslims in the south rose up against Hussein’s government. Some Shiite leaders, particularly those who sneaked into the country from Iran, hid in the marshes, which were out of the reach of Hussein’s tanks and artillery. The Shiite leaders were welcomed — and aided — by the Shiite Marsh Arabs. Even after Hussein’s army quashed the revolt by slaughtering thousands of Shiites and attacking their villages, the president was bent on retribution. He ordered the marshes drained. The engineering feat was enormous -- and remarkably successful. The Euphrates, which spilled entirely into the southern half of the marshes, was diverted into a wide new canal called the Mother of All Battles River that stretched more than 100 miles around the former wetlands. Farther upstream, billions of gallons of Euphrates water was redirected in another canal and dumped into a depression in the desert. The same strategy was employed on the Tigris River, parching the northern and eastern sections of the marshes. Before Hussein’s drainage project, Iraq’s marshes were the Middle East’s largest wetland, covering about 7,500 square miles. By the late 1990s, satellite images indicated that less than 10 percent of Iraq’s marshland had any water. What remained was miles of parched, salty earth covered with clumps of scrub brush. With no way to fish or farm, no reeds or birds, legions of Marsh Arabs had no choice but to leave the only place they considered home. Tens of thousands fled as refugees to Iran. By 1993, the United Nations estimated there were only 50,000 marsh dwellers left, and their numbers continued to dwindle over the following years. In mid-April, a few days after Hussein’s government fell, Ali Shaheen returned to his job as director of the Irrigation Department in Nasiriyah. Located about 25 miles northwest of Zayad, Nasiriyah was the scene of some of the heaviest fighting during the war. But with the hostilities over and Shiites firmly in control of the local government, he decided to try to reverse the damage Hussein had wrought. With a U.S. military escort, he drove to Garmat Bani Hassan, a town a mile away from Zayad. There, he ordered creaky metal gates on the Euphrates to be cranked open for the first time since 1991. Shaheen, a short, balding civil engineer with a stubble-covered face, did the same thing with two other gates before embarking on a bigger engineering challenge — redirecting the Euphrates. He requisitioned several Irrigation Department bulldozers and smashed the dam Hussein had constructed to divert water to the Mother of All Battles River. For good measure, he had Hussein’s river blocked off with a mountain of dirt. He had no orders to redirect the rivers. There was no functioning Irrigation Ministry at the time. But he assumed he was doing what the Marsh Arabs wanted. "Drying the marshes was a crime," said Shaheen, who joined the Irrigation Department in 1998, after the canals and dams were built. "I felt I needed to do whatever I could to restore what Saddam destroyed." As the Euphrates returned to its original course, water surged toward Zayad and other villages on the western side of the marshes that are closest to the river’s mouth. The arid flats were covered with more than three feet of water, swallowing the scrub brush and a few homes that were built after the marshes were dried. Shaheen calculated that more than 1 quadrillion gallons were needed to fill the Euphrates side of the marshes. But the flow at Nasiriyah, which had been 106,000 gallons per second before 1991, was down to 21,000 gallons per second because of new dams and irrigation canals built in Iraq, Syria and Turkey over the past decade. "The water we have is not enough," he said. By midsummer, the water’s advance had slowed. Villages just a few miles east of Zayad are still dry, with residents wondering when they will be able to ride a mashoof again. If the flow does not increase, Shaheen predicted it will take more than 100 years to flood the marshes. "It’s not an issue of opening the gates and dams over here," he said. "We need more water from upstream." The reeds are not yet sufficient to rebuild the huts destroyed by Hussein’s army. The birds that have returned are not the right species to trap. But as the scion of a clan that has lived here for perhaps 5,000 years, Kerkush said he is willing to be patient while engineers and politicians figure out how to pump more water into the marshes. "Saddam did everything he could to kill us," he said. "You cannot recover from that right away." Explain to me again why we should have left Hussein in power. | |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #8 Uh-oh--anti Semitisme! Le Marais is the Jewish Quarter! |
| Posted by: Not Mike Moore 2003-10-11 4:59:12 PM |
| #7 So how long would it take us to restore the wetlands at Le Marais? |
| Posted by: Dishman 2003-10-11 1:51:03 PM |
| #6 The other thing about this article that caught my eye was the patience of the Marsh Arabs. They understand, much better than the UN, EU, and Democrat Party, that things that took a long time to screw up take some time to fix... |
| Posted by: snellenr 2003-10-11 1:43:02 PM |
| #5 Wetlands that are not deep are amazingly resilient. When the US & Canada decided to treat the Great Lakes like the valauble resources they are Lake Erie was one of the first to clean itself up because it is realtively shallow. Still remember when the Cuyahoga caught fire. I bet there was some serious polution flowing into Erie from that mess. |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2003-10-11 12:26:14 PM |
| #4 Someone - Bremer most especially - needs to give Ali Shaheen a medal. Independent thought, follow-through, and willingness to go against the "status quo" need to be applauded - and rewarded - in the "new" Iraq. If we ever do capture Hussein, we need to gather a delegate of Marsh Arabs and Kurds to try him, judge him, and impose the consequences of his behavior - the more long, drawn-out and painful the better. |
| Posted by: Old Patriot 2003-10-11 11:36:23 AM |
| #3 Yep, they're endangering the rare Hellhole Rat |
| Posted by: Shipman 2003-10-11 11:20:19 AM |
| #2 Actually, I expect to hear them complain about the destruction of the fragile post-marsh ecology created during Saddams reign. |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2003-10-11 11:08:39 AM |
| #1 Someone heard of Greens protesting for the ecological destruction brought up by Saddam Hussein from the draining of the marshes to setting up hundreds of oil wells on fire? No? Just what I thought. |
| Posted by: JFM 2003-10-11 10:43:34 AM |