The Marshland

The wetlands in southern Iraq and southwest Iran are known as the Mesopotamian Marshes. They were once the most significant wetlands ecosystem in Western Asia and considered the cradle of civilisation for more than 5,000 years. Historically, the area covered 20,000 square kilometres that supported rich biodiversity and the Marsh Arabs’ (or the Ma’dan) unique culture that is firmly rooted in this watery landscape. 8 It is located between the two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates to form Shatt Al Arab, a site believed by many historians to be the location of the Garden of Eden, referenced in the Quran and the Bible 9 Annually, the melting of the snow in spring on the mountains in Iran and Turkey caused the Tigris, Euphrates and Karkha rivers to flood. Thus, the marshes were created due to centuries of the naturally forming cycle of overflowing rivers. 10 Three main marshes exist: the Al-Hammar, Central, and AlHuwaiza Marshes.

The Ma’dan are believed to have lived on this land since the Sumerians and the Babylonians, with their way of life being considered one of the oldest continuously living cultures to date. Their livelihood throughout history has been linked to fishing, rice cultivation, and breeding of buffalos. Throughout their history, they have relied on the abundant swamp reeds around them to build houses and community spaces, making the weaving of mat reeds, which is exported by canoes throughout Iraq, a main source of their income. With the onset of modernity between the 1960s and 1980s, and with the economic boom Iraq has been experiencing in the 1970s, this area continued to see developments despite the slow immigration of its inhabitants away from rural and towards more urban and industrial centres in the country. This, however, was quickly halted in the late 1980s, during the Iraq-Iran war which quickly turned this region into a battle zone. Due to its proximity to Iran, as well as the known presence of paramilitary groups in the region, Saddam Hussein’s Baath regime targeted this region with air and land-based violence, pushing the United Nations to impose a no-fly zone in the area in 1992. While it began with a systemic campaign to burn marsh villages and displace the population, it then developed into the development of hydrological infrastructure to divert water away from the wetlands and facilitate military penetration of the area. 11 These first attacks on the Marsh Arabs was dubbed by a Human Rights Report to be one of the worse repressions of genocide and ecocide witnessed by the Baath regime, with an estimated 93% of the marshes having had disappeared as a consequence 12

Remote data, such as before and after aerial images of the site, is used here to assess the changing land use and landscape during this time. In 1994, a report was first published by the AMAR International Charitable Foundation 13 , reflecting on aerial cartography of the site and comparing it to a lost Garden of Eden. This report encouraged further investigation by the United Nations in a report titled “Mesopotamian Marshlands: the Demise of an Ecosystem”, which first publicised the destruction, utilising aerial photography to portray changes to the landscape over the past ten

8 Thesiger, W. (2007) The marsh arabs. London: Penguin.

9 Adriansen, H.K. (2006) “What happened to the Iraqi Marsh Arabs and their land?,” Danish Institute for International Studies [Preprint].

10 Newman, S.D. (2007) “The plight of the marsh arabs, an environmental and human rights crisis,” Advances in Nursing Science, 30(4), pp. 315–328. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1097/01.ans.0000300181.71724.c7.

11 Ahram, A.I. (2015) “Development, counterinsurgency, and the destruction of the Iraqi Marshes,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 47(3), pp. 447–466. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020743815000495.

12 Adriansen, H.K. (2006) “What happened to the Iraqi Marsh Arabs and their land?,” Danish Institute for International Studies [Preprint].

13 AMAR International @amarlondon, AMAR Foundation - Rebuilding Lives. Available at: https://www.amarfoundation.org/ (Accessed: April 11, 2023).

Al Mounajim

years. While this only received temporary public attention, it pushed international courts to refer to the Ma’dan as a “persecuted minority” whose survival and livelihood was threatened by the regime due to their “otherness”. 14

This forensic technique serves useful in representing conflicts and acts of land reconstruction, shifting attention from the human agency on land to the landscape fabric and representations of territory to understand the result and scale of this violence. In understanding their use in cases of internal colonisation, such satellite images have been used countlessly by human rights groups and international organisations and in the fields of criminology to create a forensic-like method to identify political acts of trauma and destruction committed by state sovereignty. 15 This method has been used in various cases to prove state control and conflict, such as in the West Bank, the Crimean war, and Yemen 16

Thus, satellite data of the Mesopotamian marshes collected over the past 51 years demonstrate the vast complexity in the changes in water make up and, subsequently, the entanglement of environmental and vegetation patterns that will no doubt affect generations of human and non-human life in the future as a result of this conflict.

14 Ibid.

15 Kurgan, L. (2022) Close up at a distance: Mapping, technology, and politics. New York: Zone Books.

16 Weizman, E. and Weizman, I. (2014) Before and after documenting the architecture of disaster. London: Strelka Press.

17 Albarakat, R., Lakshmi, V. and Tucker, C. (2018) “Using satellite remote sensing to study the impact of climate and anthropogenic changes in the Mesopotamian marshlands, Iraq,” Remote Sensing, 10(10), p. 1524. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/rs10101524.

18

Historically, these Marshlands have always stood out to Ottoman and British colonials as an indomitable ecology immune to state control, providing a refuge from various forms of subjugation. In a travel journal written in the 14th century, the area was described as being a “water logged jungle of reeds” where residents “fortified themselves and are able to defend themselves in it against all attacks”. 19 This changed with technological advancements, with the first aerial attacks recorded on the Marshlands being recorded in 1920, following a tribal uprising against British imperial rule in the central Marshes. 20

18 Farah Alkhoury, A.S. (2021) The ma'dān tribes of Iraq: A case for environmental refugees, Conflict Urbanism. Available at: https://centerforspatialresearch.github.io/conflict_urbanism_sp2021/2021/04/18/Alkhoury_Shetye.html (Accessed: January 13, 2023).

19 Ahram, A.I. (2015) “Development, counterinsurgency, and the destruction of the Iraqi Marshes,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 47(3), pp. 447–466. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020743815000495.

20 Ibid.

Interest in altering the hydro-landscape of the marshes was first presented in the 1953, based on colonial plans created by Frank Haigh to construct a 565 km long canal between the Euphrates and the Tigris, meant to desalinate the Euphrates water. In this view, ideas of imperialist colonialism as well as the need for oil and agricultural resource exploitation reflect the ideologies that water seeping into the mashes is better off being used for industrial and agricultural purposes. They should thus be taken advantage of, helping regain control of this otherwise “wild area” 21 .

Under the pretext of reclaiming land for agriculture and sustainable development, the state government co-opted this project and began draining the marshes in the 1991 22 This plan brought desertification to this delta by building a large canal on the Euphrates to divert water that flowed to main Hammar marshes. This was followed in 1994 by the building of another canal which diverted fresh water away from the Euphrates, significantly increasing the salinity of the central marshes. Drainage canals were also constructed throughout the central marshes to drain the Huwaiza and Hammar marshes in 1997. Alongside the drainage, amateur videotapes recorded by Iraqi refugees prove that the remaining water in the marshes was poisoned; making it unusable for the humans and unliveable for non-human populations such as fish and water buffaloes. Within a decade, the mashes vastly disappear, along with the overall livelihood potential for the Ma’dan. Figure 5 presents all dams that lead into the Marshes. Of these, the only partially intact marsh is located between the Iraq-Iran border and was fed by river flow beyond the Iraqi control at the time. Thus, a majority of the former marsh area had dried out and turned into thick salt crusts.

Though the outcome differed, the British and the Baath regime built upon the same view of the environment that overlooked marshlands as swamps needing to be drained to put the land to good use. 23 This is an environmental discourse in which natural resources are considered from a user perspective and not from a protection perspective. This was further and perhaps more importantly emphasised by the fact that large oil reserves are located in the area and are difficult to access prior to draining.

What separated the case of the draining of the Iraqi Marshlands from one of resource exploitation and capitalist greed is the people. The state government widely regarded the people inhabiting the Marshlands as primitive, “backward” and uncivilized – after all, they were said to have had the same way of life for 5,000 years. This was part of a modernity discourse arguing that people should be “developed” A means in this campaign was to disgrace the Marsh Arabs as well. For instance in the Baath Party (which controlled the state government from 1951 to 2003) newspaper AlThawra, advertisements and propaganda often insulted the Ma’dan by claimed that they have “become so accustomed to breeding buffaloes that they had become indistinguishable from them and that they had an intrinsic degraded nature”. 24

The Iraqi government’s motives for the campaign in the marshes can thus be summed up as such: It was to eliminate a people (i.e. the Ma’dan) outside the government’s control; to create a great engineering scheme equivalent of the palaces built in the Iraqi cities at the time; to generate economic development and increase oil production; and not least to destruct a habitat that provided refuge for regime opponents. In short the motive was to keep a regime in power.

Resource exploitation and internal colonisation go hand in hand in various global conflicts. In a study conducted in 2008, for example, it was found that thousands of indigenous Palestinians were displaced from the Hula wetlands following a drainage project in 1951. Similarly to the case of the Marshlands, the displaced population was one whose history and livelihood depended on the cultivation of the swamp. 25 This analysis cannot be limited to explanations based on utilitarian economic modernization and market interests without considering the broader social, cultural and historical coloniality conditions in the internal structure of a region. Similarly to the basis of ideas of colonialism and imperialism, and similar to the case of the Marshlands in Iraq, this encroachment is extensively built on concepts of superiority to the “other” in the eye of the governing bodies, transforming a difference onto others in creating an ethnocentric group of those that "belong to our civilization" and those who "belong to a civilization that is demarcated from the norms established". 26

21 Adriansen, H.K. (2006) “What happened to the Iraqi Marsh Arabs and their land?,” Danish Institute for International Studies [Preprint].

22 Adriansen, H.K. (2006) “What happened to the Iraqi Marsh Arabs and their land?,” Danish Institute for International Studies [Preprint].

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

25 Anton, G. (2008) “Blind Modernism and Zionist Waterscape: The Huleh Drainage Project,” Jerusalem Quarterly, (35), pp. 76–92. Available at: https://doi.org/https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/77857.

26 Jean-Francois Staszak, "Other/Otherness", International Encyclopedia Of Human Geography, 2008 <https://www.unige.ch/sciences-societe/geo/files/3214/4464/7634/OtherOtherness.pdf> [Accessed 26 February 2022].

27 Bruneau, C and Sudani, T (2021) 'Our whole life depends on water': Climate change, pollution and dams threaten Iraq's Marsh Arabs, Reuters. Thomson Reuters. Available at: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/our-whole-life-depends-waterclimate-change-pollution-dams-threaten-iraqs-marsh-2021-10-14/ (Accessed: April 10, 2023).

28 Ibid.

29 Mesopotamian Marshes, Iraq (no date) EROS. USGS. Available at: https://eros.usgs.gov/mediagallery/earthshot/mesopotamian-marshes-iraq (Accessed: April 9, 2023).

Satellite images presented in Figure 8 best begin to help visualise this campaign. Imagery collected clearly represents a deterioration of natural landscapes along the Central and Hammar mashes. The vast reduction of palm and reed cultivation regions is also clearly deteriorating over time, as a result of drainage caused by the internal colonialism of a “rebel” group. This state-driven power that practices “the displacement of one political rationality over another” 30 is argued by Peter Ekeh as a colonially-induced mentality of government related to emergent forms of postcolonial governmentality. This is fundamentally one in which governance by the modern state was created to supplant earlier forms of pre-modern rule through the autonomous rationality of the government. Governmentality here thus adopts a form of internal colonialism based on the systematic redefinition and transformation of a terrain on which the life of the colonised, the Ma’dan, in the case of the Mashlands, is lived. 31

Thus, this political instability in the region in the early 1990s, combined with rising insurgence against the government at the time in the Marshlands led to the use of governmental force and policy which displaced hundreds of thousands of people. 32 This was done by blocking off or separating of water flow to the marshes through the construction of various dams over a period of 10 years, leading to the desertification of various parts of the marshes, leaving the ecological composition of the land in a detrimental state that challenged the survivability of thousands of species and consequently the existence of the Ma’dan. 33 This left the indigenous population with few options for survival in the Marshes. In the 1980s, it was estimated that half a million people lived in these marshes. It is estimated that around 250,000 people fled the region from 1988 to 1991 34, with many having to accept resettlement somewhere else within Iraq or in neighbouring Iran. By the year 2000, this number was reduced down to only 1,600 35

30 Adebanwi, W. (2016) “Africa’s ‘two publics’: Colonialism and Governmentality,” Theory, Culture & Society, 34(4), pp. 65–87. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276416667197.

31 Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller, P. (1991) Foucault effect: Studies in Governmentality. London: Wheatsheaf.

32 Farah Alkhoury, A.S. (2021) The ma'dān tribes of iraq: A case for environmental refugees, Conflict Urbanism. Available at: https://centerforspatialresearch.github.io/conflict_urbanism_sp2021/2021/04/18/Alkhoury_Shetye.html (Accessed: January 13, 2023).

33 Alani, M.A., Shen, J. and Koko, A.F. (2022) “A comprehensive study of Iraqi marshlands, with the emphasis on the development possibilities.” Available at: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-1487276/v2.

34 Farah Alkhoury, A.S. (2021) The ma'dān tribes of iraq: A case for environmental refugees, Conflict Urbanism Available at: https://centerforspatialresearch.github.io/conflict_urbanism_sp2021/2021/04/18/Alkhoury_Shetye.html (Accessed: January 13, 2023).

35 Mitchell, R. (2022) Saving Iraqi Mudhif Reed Architecture From Oblivion, Ancient Origins Reconstructing the story of humanity's past. Ancient Origins. Available at: https://www.ancient-origins.net/history-ancient-traditions/mudhif-0016908 (Accessed: January 13, 2023).

36 Iraqi Marshes, Iraq (no date) EROS. USGS. Available at: https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/iraq-marshlands

An Environment of Temporality

Throughout their history, the heritage of the Ma’dan, including performing arts, social practices, and rituals and festivals, have remained largely undocumented. In 1970, it was estimated that a total of 798 archaeological sites exist within the marshes, such as Ur, Uruk, Legash and Nina, most of which have never been excavated. 37

Photos of this culture were first taken in 1967 by Norwegian photographer Tor Eigenland and remainly vastly unseen until their publication in 2014 in his book “When All the Lands Were Sea: A Photographic Journey Into the Lives of the Marsh Arabs of Iraq” When asked to describe the marshlands, he stated 38:

As soon as my little boat entered the marshes from terra firma, I felt, quite abruptly, as if I had actually left the real world. There was nothing familiar there. I had entered a mystical domain of canals, small lakes, and forests of tall reeds. The first village I saw at dusk was like no other place I had ever seen.

37 Adriansen, H.K. (2006) “What happened to the Iraqi Marsh Arabs and their land?,” Danish Institute for International Studies [Preprint].

38 Dimick, D. (2021) Photos from 1967 reveal a lost culture in Iraq, Photography. National Geographic. Available at: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/article/photos-from-1967-reveal-a-lost-culture-in-iraq (Accessed: April 10, 2023).

Built along a sort of channel, dozens of smart canoes with elegantly curved prows were drawn up along the banks. Their houses, called mudhifs, were built from reeds in arched shapes, with decorative patterns that date right back to ancient Babylonia. Darting about were half a dozen small canoes running unknown evening errands. Every aspect of their lives was lived on or near the water.

I had entered an isolated, functioning world little changed for thousands of years. A world that turned out to be one of generous hospitality toward strangers, somewhat like that of the desert Bedouin.

Most of the Ma’dan are semi-nomadic with some having settled on irregular clusters of islands constructed by reed mats and mud dredged from the marshes. Generally, a village would consist of a group of separate islands, each serving an individual household. 39 Reed structures are found throughout most wetland regions. Here, they are used for both the development of artificial islands, as well as the development of houses and community spaces.

In developing the island, an area of water large enough for a house and a yard is enclosed using a fence of reeds. Following this, the fence is packed with reeds and rushes. When this rush platform rises above water, the reeds of the containing fence is fractured and laid down. More rushes are piled and trampled on until they are satisfied with its foundation. To give it more permanence, the Ma’dan covered the foundations with mud extracted from the water. 40 Finally, it is ready for house construction.

The Ma’dan have been constructing their dwellings and community spaces using reed and rushes for five thousand years, where families would often share construction methods with their children in an attempt to keep the tradition alive. 41 Besides the smaller houses built on the floating islands of the marshes, wherein each household would “own” or exist on their own island, the main architectural element that served unique to this region was the construction of the guesthouses or “mudhif”, which directly translates into “place of hospitality”. It is estimated that in 1953 there were around 600 guesthouses in Chabayish 42, one of the areas of the central marshes This is a type of community space entirely built of reed and grass, making a large barrel-vaulted ceiling made up of reed lattice panels that allow airflow and sunlight in to maintain a cool internal temperature in the warm winter months. 43 It is often used as a space for ceremonial occasions such as prayer, births, funerals and community congregations.

The method of construction of these spaces constructed stripping stout reeds of their leaves, and tying them together in bundles with ropes of plaited and twisted reeds. They are then planted in the ground in two rows, facing each other, and in each row lighter pieces are lashed horizontally in order to create a rigid framework. The tops of the upright pieces are then bent inwards and tied to the head of its opposite number, forming a series of arches. Following this, reed matting is attached to the inside of the developed framework, creating what looks like a tunnel open at either end. The two end walls are then constructed of strong palm trunks covered with reeds and strengthened with matting and latticework. at each end, there are two small opening and a larger doorless entrance.

Each tribe sheik would then own one of these mudhifs, who facilitates its construction and runs it throughout his life. The process of making a mudhif includes plucking reeds from the marshes, after which they are bundled together to form columns planted in the ground to create the spine or “arches”. Smaller bundles then tie the spines together longitudinally. Following this, the roof is made of hand-woven mats and reed lattice panels are added to the sides of the walls. Finally, columns are added to the sides of the mudhif to add a grand entrance to them. 44

39 Kubba, S. (2011) The Iraqi Marshlands and the Marsh Arabs: The Ma'dan, their culture and the environment. Reading: Ithaca.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid.

42 Ibid.

43 Mitchell, R. (2022) Saving Iraqi Mudhif Reed Architecture From Oblivion, Ancient Origins Reconstructing the story of humanity's past. Ancient Origins. Available at: https://www.ancient-origins.net/history-ancient-traditions/mudhif-0016908 (Accessed: January 13, 2023).

44 Ibid.

In plan, each of these individual islands is made to serve one houses and is divided into (1) a mudhif, (2,3) the parent’s bedroom, (4) the children’s bedroom, (5) the cattle shelter, (6) the open kitchen and clay oven and (7) the haystack and storage. 45

An interesting distinction is first made regarding various communities’ relationship with land ownership and nature. While the nature versus ownership dichotomy exists so prevalently in the minds of the colonial politicians and , “is an alien epistemology for various indigenous people” 46

In theory, all land in the Marshlands belongs to the State and then leased to locals. However, they would pay their taxes and regarded the land as their own: no one questioned their title as long as they were powerful. Sheikhs whose lands bordered the Marshes had acquired a right over the villages inside, regardless if these were inhabited by other tribes. They had the authority for fining or flogging the villagers and imposing tolls on goods passing through. Although the sheikhs did not have judicial powers, when cases of tribes members appeared in the Government courts, the sheikh was preferred to be the arbitrator rather than officials. Generally, the Government was content to leave authority to the sheikhs in the marshes. Moreover, Land ownership on the local scale of these buildings and of the dwellings around them tend to exist based on the present populations, with land ownership often transferring from one household to another if pieces of land are left unoccupied for more than a year. 47 It is important to note here the vast distinction between more urban and “modern” practices of land ownership in the eye of various policies and indigenous ones, inviting the question of: What determines land ownership: proximity and connection to the land, or governing policies?

This concept is witnessed throughout various communities around the globe. Sami communities, for example, in the Lapland region of Sweden, Norway and Finland, have historically relied on reindeer herding in their practice. Thus, the land they herd on would change every season with the migration of the reindeer. This invited an architecture of temporality in the Lavvu, a dwelling used by the Sami people to enable the herders to follow their reindeer around the grass plains of Sampi region of the Arctic circle. 48

45 Kubba, S. (2011) The Iraqi Marshlands and the Marsh Arabs: The Ma'dan, their culture and the environment. Reading: Ithaca.

46 Banerjee, S.B. (2000) “Whose land is it anyway? National Interest, indigenous stakeholders, and Colonial Discourses,” Organization & Environment, 13(1), pp. 3–38. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1086026600131001.

47 Thesiger, W. (2007) The marsh arabs. London: Penguin.

48 Furberg, M., Evengård, B. and Nilsson, M. (2011) “Facing the limit of resilience: Perceptions of climate change among reindeer herding Sami in Sweden,” Global Health Action, 4(1), p. 8417. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3402/gha.v4i0.8417.

In the case of the Ma’dan, the reed buildings are also portable, thus if the marsh water rises too high in the spring a mudhif can be taken down, transported, and put back up in less than a day on another piece of land. 49 This represents an architecture of temporality represented by vernacular architectural around the globe that modernity and colonialism have altered. In his essay, “From Vernacular to Globalism” 50, AlSayyad argued that as a result of modernity, colonisation and globalisation, identity architecture that mould itself to specific environmental regions has been lost in favour of a “globally authoritative paradigm”.

While some aspects of this traditional building method remain, the knowledge of construction is currently considered endangered with the mass exodus of the Ma’dan from their home lands and are expected to disappear within the next generation. 51

Alongside a loss of people and culture, the Mesopotamian marshlands have also historically been one of the most internationally diverse wet-lands in South-West Asia as it constitutes a nursing ground for many species of birds migrating from North Europe as well as for its rich biodiversity. 52 Owing to an aforementioned decrease in freshwater, these marshlands have undergone significant environmental changes which has led to water quality deterioration and a changing hydrological regime. This has also had a considerable effect on the fauna and flora of the marshes, diminishing their ecological value and significance.

There are several paradoxes here in the rationality of governance and mentality of rule on which this internal colonialism was based. In “Colonial Governmentality and the Economy”, Kalpagam argues that “Colonial governmentality was premised on a unique relationship of the State to the population” 53 As colonialism was fundamentally a technology of exploitation through domination, colonial governmentality did not consider, and therefore did not approach, the population, their biodiversity or their cultural designs in the colony as wealth. Subsequently, it did not consider the colonial economy and livelihood development as one with potential for building wealth.

49 Mitchell, R. (2022) Saving Iraqi Mudhif Reed Architecture From Oblivion, Ancient Origins Reconstructing the story of humanity's past. Ancient Origins. Available at: https://www.ancient-origins.net/history-ancient-traditions/mudhif-0016908 (Accessed: January 13, 2023).

50 AlSayyad, N. (1995) “From Vernacularism to Globalism: The Temporal Reality of Traditional Settlements,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, 7(1), pp. 13–24. Available at: https://doi.org/https://www.jstor.org/stable/41757717.

51 Adriansen, H.K. (2006) “What happened to the Iraqi Marsh Arabs and their land?,” Danish Institute for International Studies [Preprint].

52 Kubba, S. (2011) The Iraqi Marshlands and the Marsh Arabs: The Ma'dan, their culture and the environment. Reading: Ithaca.

53 Kalpagam, U. (2000) “Colonial Governmentality and the ‘economy,’” Economy and Society, 29(3), pp. 418–438. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/03085140050084598.

Developments in Policy

While the discourse has moved away from ideas of internal colonisation in governmentality since the fall of the Baath regime in 2003, this site is still greatly affected by three key forces of destruction that has been inflicted on the Mesopotamian Marshes in the 21st century: climate change, water competition brought about by new dams and canals built downstream by Syria and Turkey and resource extraction through corrupt and capitalist systems of governance 54

Since 2003, various remediation efforts have been led by the Iraqi government and various international organisations (such as the United Nations Environment Programme) to rewild this area 55 This began in 2003 with a reflooding of the marshlands after local residents opened floodgates and breached embankments following the collapse of the government regime. Since then, the UNEP Marshlands project, “Support for the Environmental Management of the Iraqi Marshlands”, has been helping locals restore and manage them properly. 56 However, even with remediation efforts, river flow into the Mesopotamian marshlands has been cut by up to 50 percent, and the spring floods that sustained the marshlands have been eliminated. The result is that the once vast, interconnected mosaic of denselyvegetated marshlands and lakes is now mostly lifeless desert and salt-encrusted lakebeds and riverbeds. Thus, all remediation efforts are faced with three main questions: Will water supplies needed for marsh restoration be available in the future, given water competition and restrictions from within the country and from neighbouring countries? Can the Ma’dan culture ever be re-established in any significant way in the restored marshes? Can the landscape connectivity of the marshes be re-established to maintain species diversity?

Currently, the marshlands are being managed by a variety of personnel at state and local levels. At a state level, various ministries are involved in the management of the area, including the Ministry of Water Resources, Ministry of Environment, Ministry of Planning and Development Cooperation, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, Ministry of Agriculture, and the Ministry of Municipalities and Public Works. Within the Ministry of Water Resources, the Centre for Restoration of the Iraqi Marshlands (CRIM), established in 2003, has been tasked with coordinating the Marshlands’ restoration and economic development. In addition, the Ministry of State for the Marshlands was established in 2006 to provide oversight and coordination for the marsh restoration activities, and establish a comprehensive long-term development and management plan for the region. These ministries work alongside international organisations and the UNEP programme to facilitate recovery. Moreover, at the legislative level, the Council of Representatives’ Standing Committee on Agriculture is mandated with monitoring and implementation of the water resources policies and distribution, revitalization of the marshes, and cultural heritage protection. 57

Since 2014, there has also been a movement aiming to list the Marshlands as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 58 If approved, it is believed that this will attract foreign investment to strengthen the institutional and technical capacity

54 Alani, M.A., Shen, J. and Koko, A.F. (2022) “A comprehensive study of Iraqi marshlands, with the emphasis on the development possibilities.” Available at: https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-1487276/v2.

55 U.N.E.P (no date) Back to life: Environmental management of the Iraqi marshlands, UNEP. Available at: https://www.unep.org/resources/report/back-life-environmental-management-iraqi-marshlands (Accessed: January 13, 2023).

56 Ibid.

57 Adriansen, H.K. (2006) “What happened to the Iraqi Marsh Arabs and their land?,” Danish Institute for International Studies [Preprint].

58 Crunch time for Iraqi marshlands (2016) UNEP. Available at: https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/crunch-time-iraqimarshlands (Accessed: April 10, 2023).

Daniah Al Mounajim

of local communities; enabling them to manage the ecosystem and its biodiversity. The aim here is to revitalise the Marshlands into its former glory as a “Garden of Eden” or “Mesopotamian” site of heritage.

It is critical to understand here the negative and limiting connotations that come with the use of this mystical terminology. They convey a static state which leaves little room for future development and the utilisation of modern technologies to facilitate solutions. However, if development is to be made, it is essential to acknowledge a community that is no doubt affected by modernity and the power struggle taking place in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Without acknowledging this, it is difficult to determine how the rehabilitation of nature, and the political and institutional problems associated with this will encourage the displaced Ma’dan to return to their lands.