The English adventurer Wilfred Thesiger lived among them for a number of years.

He keeps memories of this world alive with his impressive descriptions and equally impressive photos in his 1964 book "The Marsh Arabs".

The waters were rich in fish at that time, sea eagles roamed the land, which is flat as far as the eye can see, as did herons and pelicans.

An idyll without the noise of the city, the comparison with the Garden of Eden seemed justified.

Rainer Hermann

Editor in politics.

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The photo series by Reuters photographer Thaier al-Sudani now impressively documents how this wetland with its numerous water arms tilts. More and more young sons and daughters no longer want to live like their ancestors and are moving to the next town. Life there is more comfortable and less full of deprivation. But they cannot find work there, like many other Iraqis, who have therefore been demonstrating against the corrupt and incompetent government in Baghdad since 2018. Nevertheless, the boys want to leave the marshland, also because they can no longer live there like their ancestors. 

They still moved with their boats day after day through the many arms of the water. What they fished they ate, what was left they sold in central locations, just like the milk of the buffalo. They built houses with only reeds. The large meeting rooms, also built only with reeds, were up to 50 meters long and had an almost sacral aura. But the modern age also moved into these reed houses of the Marshal Arabs. Today they are increasingly using iron as a supporting structure, and more and more often they even live in mud huts.

The Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein intervened in this life in 1991. That year, the Iraqi army was driven out of Kuwait, the Shiites in southern Iraq rose up against the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. The marshland was their ideal retreat. There they could go underground and go undetected. So Saddam Hussein had the marshland drained and roads built for his military vehicles to fight the insurgents.

Saddam Hussein transformed this former paradise into a desert, and from then on the desert wind swept over the endless flat plain, a salt crust covered the ground. For the first time in living memory, no people lived here. When Saddam Hussein was overthrown in 2003, the area recovered and life returned to the drained swamps. Water filled the canals again, and many returned and settled on the numerous islands where reeds were growing again.

But life as it used to be did not return. The water buffalo are still gliding silently into the water and thus withdrawing from the heat. But they give less milk. The fishermen move on through the arms of the water with their long barges, but the nets are no longer so full. The water is flowing again, it is no longer potable, so people bring the drinking water in tanks. Here, in this marshland on the lower reaches of the Euphrates and Tigris, it becomes particularly clear how true the sentence is that water means life. 

Today two developments threaten this marshland: drought and water pollution. 2021 was the second driest year in forty years. Another devastating drought is forecast for 2023. With the drought, the water level sinks, and salt water seeps in from the nearby Persian Gulf. The water becomes salty, which is why the buffalo drink less and they also give less milk. In addition, due to the meteorological characteristics, the temperature rises twice as much as the global average, which means that even more water evaporates.

So the quantity of water decreases.

At the same time, its quality deteriorates, and not just because of the salinity.

From the north, the Euphrates and Tigris rivers bring ever larger amounts of polluted water into the canals.

Every day, 5 million cubic meters of untreated wastewater flows into the Tigris, admits the Iraqi government.

That is why there are fewer fish, and therefore the Marshals have to bring the drinking water in tanks.

The polluted water caused disease, which is another reason for continued migration to cities.

The photos capture a way of life that is doomed.

They convey on the one hand how much the Marshal Arabs still live in dignity, but on the other hand also that and how human interventions deprive them of their livelihood.