Water and life slowly return to the vast wetlands of Iraq

After a month in Iraq, reporter Hal Bernton and photographer Thomas James Hurst have returned home and filed this final dispatch on the plight of the Marsh Arabs.

By Hal Bernton
Seattle Times staff reporter

	THOMAS JAMES HURST / THE SEATTLE TIMES Hanum Ghayyad makes a meager living harvesting papyrus reeds but says his life is the best it's been in a year as Marsh Arabs begin to reclaim their land.
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Ghayyad is not complaining. After two decades of relocation in distant camps, he savors his time on the water. "This is the best my life has been in years. Before, I was suffocating."

Ghayyad is a Marsh Arab, tribal people who for 5,000 years lived in the inland waterways of southeastern Iraq that lap along the border with Iran.

The area ranks as the Middle East's greatest wetland and in past centuries stretched across 7,000 miles, an area far larger than the original Florida Everglades. It is a refuge of international significance for migratory birds, and once was home to as many as 500,000 people, some of whom built their homes on small floating islands formed of woven reeds.

Over the past half-century, most of the Marsh Arabs were uprooted as the Iraqi government drained and diked nearly 90 percent of the marshland in what international observers rank as a human tragedy and environmental disaster of global importance.

Saddam Hussein's regime did much of the damage, forcibly relocating tens of thousands, killing others and prompting thousands more to flee to Iran.

Today, the Marsh Arabs are a people scattered. Some live in exile in Iran, others in camps or in the cities of southern Iraq.

As many as 70,000 stayed in or near the marshes. And others are beginning to return as recently breached dikes and dams begin to expand the remnant waterways.

The Iraqi Army helped a little. As soldiers retreated last year from Basra, they blew up a road that had held back marsh water, according to a United Nations memorandum. More recently, Iraqi engineers have rerouted river flows into the marshes. The Marsh Arabs themselves have taken picks and shovels to open additional waterways into the marsh.

	THOMAS JAMES HURST / THE SEATTLE TIMES Displaced Marsh Arabs inhabit this run-down complex in Al Amarah that Mercy Corps is helping to improve.

In the channel that runs along Ghayyad's village, the water is rising. The village is in a stark setting on drained land, devoid of trees, grass or a functioning school. It's a mudhole in winter, and as the weather warms, mosquitoes savage anything that moves. The land is littered with unexploded ordnance.

Yet several thousand people of the Ma'dan tribe live there. A single hut, built of mud and woven reeds, will support a dozen people or more. Outside, chickens, sheep, donkeys and goats freely forage.

Saddam's regime dumped the villagers at this site in 2002 after years of shuffling the tribe through relocation camps. Their camp life was part of a broader assault against the Marsh Arabs. In 1980, when Iraq began a brutal eight-year war with Iran, it viewed the waterways as a haven for the enemy.

Saddam flushed the marsh of people and water, opening the cleared land up to agriculture and drilling, which tapped into rich underground oil pools. The assault intensified post-1991, when the tribe joined in an uprising against Saddam, resulting in mass executions, as well as forced relocations.

Even when Saddam allowed the return of the Ma'dan tribe to the marsh, the people were not free to resume their old ways. The government restricted their movements and demanded they stay out of prime fishing grounds reserved for a high-ranking member of the government's Baath Party who lived in an inland villa. Those who violated the ban risked death.

"They shot my son, and he was just trying to get food for his family," said one villager. "He was 16 years old."

Bringing back the water

Today, the villagers are eager to see more and more water flushed into the marshes.

But the question of how far to take the marsh restoration is a matter of international debate. Much of the drained land is now encrusted with salt, concentrated through evaporation under the fierce summer heat. So, some of the land would need to be flushed with huge volumes of water to support freshwater life.

	THOMAS JAMES HURST / THE SEATTLE TIMES A young Marsh Arab girl attends a meeting convened for women, who often are overlooked in sessions dominated by men.

United Nations officials last year estimated that as much as 25 to 30 percent of the original marshes could eventually be restored. Last year, the U.S. Congress cut a proposed $100 million aid package for marsh restoration. Aid groups — largely funded by the United States Agency for International Development, which has budgeted $4 million for marsh restoration and management — also have stepped in to assist the people. They include Pacific Northwest-based Mercy Corps, which has opened an office in Al Amarah, a city of 300,000 that's 30 miles to the west.

The office is led by Gordon Kindlon, a New Yorker who helped to organize war protests in Manhattan. After the U.S. invasion in March, he decided to join in the reconstruction effort.

Kindlon is teamed up with Mike Nahhal, a Lebanese Christian who was one of the few international aid workers to work in Iraq under Saddam. Between 1991 and 2001, Nahhal shuttled back to Beirut once a month to visit his wife and four daughters. While working in Baghdad, he tried to monitor the plight of Marsh Arabs but was never allowed to visit their waterways.

Earlier this month, he got a first glimpse as he joined Ghayyad for a brief marsh cruise. They traveled in a traditional boat known as a belem. These craft used to be made of wood, but Ghayyad had found a cheaper alternative — thin but tough panels of fraying asbestos.

Ghayyad sat in the stern, paddling. They passed through a thicket of slender reeds dotted with egrets, emerging into a surprisingly vast lake stretching east toward the border zone with Iran. In biblical times, this area was thought to be somewhere near the original Garden of Eden, and naturalists today would delight in its array of birds, fish and mammals, including wild boar.

Nahhal, tucked into the bow, was content just to glimpse the watery horizon. "Wow! Wow! Look at this," he exclaimed. "It is an ocean of water. You don't see the end."

Needs: education, electricity

	THOMAS JAMES HURST / THE SEATTLE TIMES A beam of light shines on a community meeting in a tribal lodge made of woven and tied reeds. Participants discussed the need for electricity, education and flood prevention.

That same day, at a community meeting, the Marsh Arabs made it clear that the marsh alone can no longer sustain them. Their children, for years, had been denied an education. They demanded books, a blackboard and a teacher for a primary school built by Saddam but never opened.

They wanted electricity for fans to push away the bugs. And they figured they'd better raise the dike along the channel so that the rising waters wouldn't eventually flood their village.

The meeting was convened in a kind of tribal lodge. It was a spacious hut, with a high ceiling supported by thick arching pillars made of woven reeds. More than 40 men and boys crowded onto carpets spread across the floor. Soon, they were all talking so loudly it was difficult for anyone to be heard.

Few women dared to attend, let alone speak up. So the women were invited to a second meeting, which was organized by Cassandra Nelson, a former Merrill Lynch vice president who now works for Mercy Corps.

Nelson shooed away the men who wanted to monitor the meeting, and she found that the women had plenty to say. They talked about the difficulties of childbirth, pointing out that village midwives use reeds to cut umbilical cords. They spoke of husbands who sometimes beat them when they complain too much. But they did agree with the men that education and electricity ranked as the village's top priorities.

City dwellers

	THOMAS JAMES HURST / THE SEATTLE TIMES Fisherman Faleh Ghiradh paddles his boat toward open marsh waters. Saddam restricted access to tribal fishing grounds.

Mercy Corps already has launched aid projects for Marsh Arabs who live in a complex of run-down three-story apartments in nearby Al Amarah.

Even amid the urban landscape, you can see the influence of the old ways. Woven reed walls create courtyards around bottom-floor apartments. Ducks, donkeys and sheep roam outside. And these Marsh Arabs have a tribal chief — Sheik Adan Amer — who leads his people from within the cramped confines of a three-room unit.

But the Al Amarah complex is a mess. Last fall, when Mercy Corps workers first visited, the buildings were surrounded by moats of sewage that reached up to the knees of barefoot children. "Never, even in Pakistan and Afghanistan, did I see anything like that," Nelson said.

Mercy Corps is committing about $600,000 to help improve the situation. Local contractors already have cleared away a lot of the sewage ponds and are going to replumb the complex to connect to a central city system.

Inside the building, they tackled another big complaint: The stairs were built without railings, and proved treacherous in frequent blackouts. Over the years, dozens of children had fallen off the stairs and been seriously injured or killed. So within a few months, Mercy Corps had thick concrete sidewalls added to the 58 stairwells. Now contractors will shore up the stairs, which might otherwise collapse.

If the marshes keep expanding, some of the older men in the apartment complex may opt to leave the city and return home. Others no longer dream of the vast water.

"The young men, they now have jobs, and are settled. They cannot leave," said the Sheik Amer. "They cannot."

Hal Bernton: 206-464-2581 or hbernton@seattletimes.com

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