Mohammed Hamid Nour is just 23 however is already nostalgic for a way Iraq’s Mesopotamian marshes as soon as had been earlier than drought dried them up, decimating his herd of water buffaloes.
Even at their centre in Chibayish, only some expanses of the traditional waterways – house to a Marsh Arab tradition that goes again millennia – survive, linked by channels that snake by the reeds.
Pull again additional and the water offers solution to naked, cracked earth.
Mohammed has misplaced three-quarters of his herd to the drought that’s now ravaging the marshes for a fourth consecutive yr. The United Nations mentioned it’s the worst in 40 years, describing the scenario as “alarming”, with “70 percent of the marshes devoid of water”.
“I beg you, Allah, have mercy!” Mohammed implored, keffiyeh on his head as he contemplated the catastrophe below the unforgiving blue of a cloudless sky.
As the marshes dry out, the water will get salty till it begins killing the buffaloes. Many of Mohammed’s herd died like this, others he was pressured to promote earlier than they too perished.
“If the drought continues and the government doesn’t help us, the others will also die,” mentioned the younger herder, who has no different earnings.
In the Nineties, Iraq’s former strongman President Saddam Hussein drained the marshes – which had been 20,000sq km (7,700sq miles) – to punish the Marsh Arabs, diverting the flows of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers away from the land.
It was solely after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that folks started to dismantle the Saddam-era infrastructure, permitting the marshes to refill barely, however they’re nonetheless solely 4,000sq km (1,500sq miles) by the most recent estimates – additionally choked by dams on the Tigris and Euphrates upstream in Turkey and Syria and hovering temperatures of local weather change.
Iconic tradition
Marsh buffalo milk is an iconic a part of Iraqi delicacies, as is the thick, clotted “geymar” cream Iraqis like to have with honey for breakfast.
The buffaloes are difficult to boost and their milk can’t be mass-produced, and their rearing is tied to the marshes
Both the Mesopotamian marshes and the tradition of the Ma’dan – Marsh Arabs – who reside in them, have UNESCO World Heritage standing. The Ma’dan have hunted and fished there for five,000 years, constructing homes from woven reeds on floating reed islands the place the Tigris and Euphrates rivers come collectively earlier than pouring into the Gulf.
Even their superbly intricate mosques had been made from reeds.
Today, only some thousand of the quarter million Ma’dan who lived within the marshes within the early Nineties stay.
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