Q J Med 2003; 96: 463
© 2003 Association of Physicians
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Marshes in Southern Iraq
Photographed by Dr Alex Paton
For 5000 years, the reclusive Mad’an people lived in Southern Iraq among the marshes formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates. When we visited in the 1970s, we were told that the people were more ancient than the first Sumerian inhabitants of nearby Ur, where we were shown Abraham’s house; the Garden of Eden was said to have been situated in the nearby surrounding countryside. In the 1970s, 0.25m people occupied 6000 sq. miles of marshes, living in ‘villages’ of semicircular houses made of intricately woven reeds, dominated by imposing buildings (mudifha) for their sheikhs, which doubled as guest-houses and meeting-places for local business. They subsisted on fishing, duck-shooting, and hunting wild boar, and each family owned a few sad-looking water buffaloes for their milk. Above all their time was spent harvesting the reeds, and shipping huge quantities of matting to market in Basra. Men, women and children travelled everywhere in slim, high-prowed, black, gondola-like boats (mashoof) steered by a single pole.These people were fiercely independent, and would have nothing to do with a government seeking to impose taxes and provide schools and medical services. The explorer and author of The Marsh Arabs, Wilfred Thesiger, spent much of the 1950s living among them, helping to provide simple treatments and train villagers in their use, but he realized that their failure to adapt to modernity would be their downfall. At that time, Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq had begun to build a series of dams across the two rivers. ‘Soon,’ Thesiger predicted, ‘the Marshes will probably be drained; when this happens a way of life that has lasted thousands of years will disappear.’
Thesiger’s view proved correct, but he could not have foreseen the suddenness with which a unique way of life collapsed. The inaccessiblity of the Marshes, and the fact that the people were Shia Muslims, attracted dissidents opposed to the ruling Sunni minority, and during the Iran-Iraq war they fought with the Iranians, causing considerable damage to the Marshes. After the 1991 Gulf War, an uprising of the southern Shia was brutally put down by Saddam’s regime, the population was much reduced by death and exile, and the Marshes were systematically drained. What might once have been a World Heritage Site is now an arid desert.
Alex Paton
Editor: The Iraq Foundation, with funding from the US Department of State, has recently initiated the Eden Again project, which aims to restore the Mesopotamian Marshlands. The preliminary results of hydrological modelling suggest that there is enough water in Southern Iraq for a partial restoration. Details can be found at [http://www.iraqfoundation.org/projects/edenagain/].
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