International Courant
Mohammed Hamid Nour is barely 23, however already nostalgic for what Iraq’s Mesopotamian swamps as soon as appeared like earlier than drought dried them up and decimated his herd of water buffalo.
Even of their middle in Chibayish, just a few huge historical waterways – house to a swamp Arab tradition courting again 1000’s of years – stay, related by canals winding by means of the reeds.
Withdraw additional and the water provides strategy to naked, cracked earth.
Mohammed has misplaced three quarters of his herd because of the drought that’s now ravaging the swamps for the fourth yr in a row. The United Nations referred to as this the worst in forty years and described the state of affairs as “alarming”, with “70 p.c of swamps disadvantaged of water”.
“I encourage you, Allah, have mercy!” Muhammad pleaded with keffiyeh on his head as he contemplated the catastrophe below the unforgiving blue of a cloudless sky.
Because the swamps dry out, the water turns into salty till it begins to kill the buffalo. A lot of Muhammad’s flock died on this method, others he needed to promote earlier than they too perished.
“If the drought continues and the federal government doesn’t assist us, the others will die too,” mentioned the younger shepherd, who has no different revenue.
Within the Nineties, Iraq’s former strongman, President Saddam Hussein, drained the swamps – which lined 20,000 sq. kilometers – to punish the Marsh Arabs by diverting the flows of the nation’s Tigris and Euphrates rivers to steer.
Solely after the 2003 invasion of Iraq did folks start to dismantle Saddam-era infrastructure, permitting some replenishment of the swamps, however the newest estimates say they’re nonetheless solely 4,000 sq. kilometers in measurement – additionally choked by dams on the Tigris and the Euphrates upstream in Turkey and Syria and rising temperatures resulting from local weather change.
Iconic tradition
Swamp buffalo milk is an iconic a part of Iraqi delicacies, as is the thick, clotted ‘geymar’ cream that Iraqis prefer to eat with honey for breakfast.
The buffalo are tough to boost and their milk can’t be mass produced, and their schooling is tied to the swamps
Each the Mesopotamian swamps and the tradition of the Ma’dan – Marsh Arabs – who dwell there have the standing of UNESCO World Heritage. The Ma’dan have hunted and fished there for five,000 years, constructing homes of woven reeds on floating reed islands the place the Tigris and Euphrates rivers meet earlier than emptying into the Gulf.
Even their superbly elaborate mosques have been product of reeds.
In the present day, just a few thousand of the quarter of one million Ma’dan who lived within the swamps within the early Nineties stay.
Iraq’s swamps are dying, and so is a civilization | Local weather disaster
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