Few places would better qualify for hell on earth. In Basra, gas flares from oil wells shoot upward. They turn the sky orange at night and bake what is already one of the hottest places on earth by day. The ground is cooked to toast. The wreckage of past invasions and wars litters a landscape otherwise unremittingly barren and flat. Most of the palm trees that covered the surface have either wilted or been severed by shells. Slums spill out of Iraq’s decrepit second city, adding the black stench of sewage to the assault on the senses.
Out of the desolation flow the cleansing, balmy waters of the Ahwar, Iraq’s marshes. Barely an hour’s drive north on the highway from Basra, left at a derelict paper mill, and beyond an army checkpoint, herds of water buffalo slide into the cool shallows and bathe between the bulrushes. I went there in February, as spring was coming, and found Razaq Jabbar, a wizened boatman in a traditional black tunic crisply buttoned to the neck, waiting by his motorized mashoof, or gondola. He invited me and my traveling companions—Jassim al-Asadi, a director of Nature Iraq, which works to revive the wetlands, and my guide, Abbas al-Jabouri, and his teenage son—aboard, and steered his boat through a maze of reeds that bristled above marshlands stretching reassuringly beyond the horizon. As he sailed, he regaled us with the same songs he had sung a few months earlier to the Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, in the same boat. He moaned for lovers lost forever in the harsh desert and delighted in new ones found among the wetlands. We clapped in accompaniment as he turned primordial fertility myths into song.
The return of the marshlands after a century of planned and unplanned desiccation is like Noah’s flood in reverse. Ever since the 1970s, Turkey and Syria had dammed the Euphrates River and its tributaries, curtailing the annual deluge that cooled and enriched Iraq’s flatlands with water and silt from Anatolia’s snowcapped mountains. Formerly fast-flowing waters slowed to a trickle, or on occasion stopped altogether. Fields lost their fecundity and turned to crust. The Middle East’s largest wetlands shrank and dried.