The Marsh Arabs

As we pack up to leave the Al-Zaitoon, I walk across the road to pay my respects to the Euphrates. It flows out of a city rebuilding itself, repairing the damage it sustained. It’s frustrating that, apart from the ziggurat, the evidence of the glorious past of Ur of the Chaldees is buried somewhere, beneath the rubble of the present.

I climb into the car. I can leave Nasiriyah with some satisfaction.

At least I’ve achieved a childhood ambition to see a ziggurat, and to tread the sands where Ur once stood, even if I did have to put my imagination into overdrive.

Nasiriyah by day is a big, lively town with its own formidable rush hour, which we negotiate slowly. One feature of the roads here and throughout southern Iraq is the profusion of posters of Shia heroes such as Muqtada al-Sadr, Ayatollah Khomeini, and the photogenic silver-bearded twosome of Iranian General Qassim Soleimani and Iraqi militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Mohandes, both of whom were assassinated by the Americans at Baghdad airport just over two years ago. Gone, but certainly not forgotten. We are into conservative Shia Iraq here and there are no helpful English translations on the signs and billboards. I feel oddly uneasy, very much an outsider.

I ask my driver about the black flags I see with increasing frequency, and which remind me uncomfortably of the flags carried by ISIS convoys as they swept into towns and villages. I’m told that these could not be more different. They are black as a sign of respect for the death of the Prophet’s grandson Husayn, thirteen hundred years ago. And the occasional red flags? They’re in memory of his brother Ahmad. The flags, and little huts for overnight refuge, are there to encourage those doughty pilgrims who make the 300-mile journey from Basra to the shrine at Karbala by foot.

Down here in the south, religion has claimed the roadside.

We’re now witnessing the last acts of the journey of the Tigris and Euphrates to the sea. And in their very late stages they’ve created something quite spectacular. It’s a whole unique environment: a wide area of marshland, formed over the years by the deposits from the rivers which pushed back the sea and created a unique and constantly changing riverine habitat; one which has been settled for many thousands of years by those generally lumped together as Marsh Arabs.

In the 1940s and ’50s that most intrepid of English travellers, Wilfred Thesiger, lived among them, and I’ve been preparing myself for our visit by reading his friend Gavin Maxwell’s account of their time together in the marshes, A Reed Shaken by the Wind. It’s an affectionate portrait of an idiosyncratic community, but some of the observations have left me distinctly queasy. Especially on the digestion front. Quoting the Arab proverb, ‘Eat like a camel and be the first to finish’, Maxwell explains that every meal ‘is, indeed, a sort of eating race, and each man crams himself feverishly, in a silence unbroken save for champing jaws and the occasional belch’. His description of the content of the cuisine makes it sound pretty alarming, too. Sheep’s heads cooked on a buffa­lo-dung fire, for instance. ‘Pieces of flesh from the ear, the hair still attached, are esteemed a delicacy.’

Saddam Hussein, accusing the Marsh Arabs of aiding and abetting the enemy in the Iran-Iraq war, retaliated by draining the marshes, deliberately depriving their inhabitants of their homes and livelihoods. In the 1950s there were close to half a million living in the marshes. When Saddam destroyed their way of life, their numbers dropped to twenty thousand. They’ve now recovered somewhat, but only to forty thousand.

After Saddam’s fall the waters flowed again and this extraordinary ecosystem began to re-establish itself. Though it is far from fully restored, it now, according to a government body grandly titled the Centre for Iraqi Marshes and Wetlands, covers an area of nearly four thousand square miles.

Our time in Iraq is running out, which makes every interruption even more frustrating. On the road from Nasiriyah we’re stopped in the middle of nowhere at a checkpoint manned by a single guard. And he’s in no hurry to let us through whilst he seeks confirmation that we are who we say we are. Forty-five minutes later we’re on our way. The landscape is changing quite dramatically. The long, straight road is now running alongside watery reedbeds. Heathland has become marshland. It’s not unlike east Suffolk.
At a small town we embark in narrow, sharp-nosed canoes that will take us up through the canals into the marshes.

With us is Azzam, a vocal enthusiast and expert on the way of life here. As we speed out onto the water he shouts to me over the noise of the outboard. The main problem these days, he explains, is water distribution. The survival of the marshes depends on the rain that falls hundreds of miles to the north in Turkey and Kurdistan, making it no longer just a question of climate but of politics, too. Without that water the plants cannot grow, the birds have nothing to feed on, and the whole cycle of birth and re-birth is disrupted. Our river journey comes full circle. The fate of the Marsh Arabs and the snows of Turkey inextricably linked.

The canal system in the marshes is like a road network: main high­ways, up which our wiry, aged boatman can squeeze the throttle and, leading off them, narrower access channels. Since the reeds that line them can be damaged by the wash from the boat’s propellors, we slow down, giving me a chance to take in something I’ve seen so little of in Iraq thus far: its wildlife. Flocks of graceful white herons skim the reeds, and kingfishers dart about. We put in at a small island only a few yards square to which we’re welcomed by a noisy herd of geese. A family of ten people lives here, together with the geese and a lot of chickens.

And that’s not all. When I wander into the larger of the two reed-built houses a dozen heads turn towards me. They’re water buffaloes, precious enough to the family to have them sharing the accommodation.

Sabah Thamer Htaiht, the head of the family, is a young man, solemn and passionate about their life on the island. When Saddam drained the marshes, the family moved to Samarra, two hundred miles away. He and his father had to take menial jobs to survive and were deeply unhappy there.

Though his father is now very sick, he’s much happier to be back in the marshes on the island where he was born and where his family have lived for so long. The son shows me round. The houses are made entirely from reeds and bulrushes, and are measured by the number of arches they need to support the roof. One is a ‘bachelor hut’, of five arches, which is where visitors stay. The family all live in the ten-arch hut. With the buffaloes, I assume.

It looks idyllic but all is not well. They make their living largely from fishing, but for two years now the spring rains have failed and the water has become less clean and the fish fewer. He doesn’t believe the government are doing much to protect their livelihoods. There is a living to be made from cutting and selling the reeds, but a day’s work would earn you only about twenty dollars. His children are educated at home. Getting to the nearest school is too much of a hassle. Surprisingly enough he sees some hope in tourism. He has had visitors to stay here and there is a growing appetite for people to know more about life on the islands.

Those who live among the marshes have always been skilful, self-sufficient and independent. They’re bloody-minded and proud of it. Which is why Saddam Hussein came for them.

I hope they survive here. It is a way of life very much in harmony with nature, so much more attractive than the noisy, dirty, hot streets of the cities.

As we leave I ask Azzam what he thinks the future might be. He, too, sees some hope in tourism – that visitors will want to come to this unique world and be welcomed by people like Sabah. The water shortage can be partly alleviated by reverse osmosis which can turn seawater into drinking water. But he is not hopeful that the government cares enough to face up to the Marsh Arabs’ problems. The money is there but it disappears into so many pockets before being spent where it’s needed. He shakes his head in frustration. Iraq, he says grimly, is a kleptocracy.