(Chibayich) In a “before” with idyllic accents, Mohammed Hamid Nour was at the head of a herd of a hundred water buffaloes. Since then, the Mesopotamian marshes in southern Iraq have dried up, its livestock has been decimated.
Looking down on the central Chibayich swamp from the sky, the view is dramatic.
Only a few bodies of water remain, linked together by corridors that wind through the reeds. As the water receded, it gave way to a bald earth that looks like parchment-like skin covered with fine lines.
For the fourth consecutive year, drought has overwhelmed these marshes and decimated buffaloes and buffaloes, whose milk is used to produce the “geymar”, a lumpy cream that Iraqis love.
The sky is desperately blue and Mohammed Hamid Nour, 23, keffiyeh on his head, contemplates the disaster: “I implore your mercy, my God! “. In a few months he lost three quarters of his buffaloes, dead or sold before they died.
As the marshes dry out, the salinity of the water increases. When it is too strong, it kills cattle.
“If the drought continues and the government doesn’t help us, the others will also die,” says the young man who has no other source of income.
This is the worst drought in 40 years and the situation is “alarming” for “the marshes, 70% of which are devoid of water, the UN said this week.
The marshes of Mesopotamia, these wetlands distributed in Chibayich, Hawizeh and al-Hammar, classified as world heritage sites by UNESCO, are dying out. And with them the civilization of the Maadan, hunter-fishermen settled here for 5000 years.
From 20,000 km2 in the early 1990s, the three marshes fell within 4000 km2, according to the latest estimates. Only a few thousand Maadan still live there.
In question: the rise in temperatures and the lack of rain which, four years ago, caused the desolation of these marshes which were already so difficult to survive the dams built in recent decades in neighboring countries upstream of the Tigris and the ‘Euphrates, and to an ancestral water management judged unfortunate by the experts.
50 degrees
At the end of June when AFP traveled through the central marsh of Chibayich, the thermometer showed 35 degrees at dawn. During the day, it is close to 50 degrees.
The UN ranks Iraq among the five countries most affected by some effects of climate change. Precipitation is extremely rare and by 2050, the average annual temperature should have gained 2.5 degrees, according to the World Bank.
The level of the central swamp and the Euphrates, its main source of water, “falls half a centimeter a day”, notes Jassim al-Assadi, a 66-year-old engineer, an ardent defender of the swamps within the NGO Nature Iraq.
“Within one to two months, temperatures will be very high and water evaporation will be even higher. »
Mohammed Hamid Nour has taken up residence with his buffaloes on a plot of land from which the water has just withdrawn. To water them, he is obliged to go in a canoe to a deeper place, with less high salinity, to fill cisterns with water which he brings back to his animals.
On his forearm he sports a tattoo of Zulfikar, the sword of Imam Ali, the founding figure of Shia Islam. The tattoo is for the “baraka”, the “blessing”, he smiles.
Thirty years ago, the marshes had already experienced their first death, when Saddam Hussein had them drained. Ulcerated by the Shiite uprising that occurred after the Gulf War in 1991, the dictator had taken it into his head to hunt down the rebels in the smallest corners of the marshes.
In a few months, more than 90% of the marshes had turned into “desert”, recalls Jassim al-Assadi. The majority of the 250,000 inhabitants “had then left the region to go elsewhere in Iraq, even to Sweden or the United States”.
After the fall of Saddam Hussein during the American invasion in 2003, the marshes experienced a second life with the destruction of the dykes and canals which had been used to drain them artificially. The canoes have resumed sailing in corridors of water lined with reeds and islets inhabited by Maadan who have returned to their homes.
Twenty years later, as one progresses by canoe, the level drops inexorably.
Waste
“In Iraq, the Euphrates has seen its level drop by around 50% since the 1970s,” says Ali al-Quraishi, a marsh expert and member of the Technical University of Baghdad. According to him, the “main” reasons for this debacle are to be found upstream, in neighboring countries.
Turkey, where the Tigris and Euphrates rise, Syria and Iran have built a multitude of dams on the two rivers and their tributaries.
“The Turks built more dams in order to meet the demand for (their) agriculture. As the population grows, so does the demand for water for domestic use and irrigation water,” says Quraishi.
The water issue is still fueling tensions between Turkey and Iraq. As Iraq asks Ankara to release more water, Turkey’s Ambassador to Baghdad Ali Riza Güney caused outrage in July 2022 by accusing Iraqis of “wasting water”.
In the criticism of the Turkish diplomat there is a part of truth. According to scientists, the management of water resources by the Iraqi authorities is far from ideal.
Since Sumerian and Akkadian times, Iraqi farmers have resorted to flood irrigation, which is widely seen as a huge waste.
But even for agriculture, water is running out and the authorities have drastically reduced crops. The priority now is to meet the drinking water needs of the 42 million inhabitants.
In an interview with the BBC at the end of June, Iraqi President Abdel Latif Rachid assured that the government had taken “significant measures to improve the water system and (started) a dialogue with neighboring countries”, without however entering into the details.
Heavy metals
By sinking into the central marsh, the canoe nearly got stuck. There is simply no more water.
The shore is desert land from which the water withdrew “two months ago”, explains Youssef Mutlaq, a 20-year-old breeder, his face protected from the sun and dust by a scarf.
Until recently, about ten “mudhifs”, traditional reed dwellings, were occupied.
“There were plenty of cattle, but when the water started to disappear, people left,” he breathes one eye at his buffaloes chewing on bagged food for lack of grass and foliage. increasingly rare in marshes.
Added to salinity is pollution.
Pesticides, sewage, waste from factories or hospitals dumped into the Euphrates along the cities crossed upstream are all factors of degradation, explains Nadheer Fazaa, a teacher at the University of Baghdad and a specialist in climate change in Iraq.
The pollutants “end their course” in the central marsh. “We analyzed the quality of the water and we found many pollutants, such as heavy metals” which cause diseases, reports the scientist.
The peach is slowly dying. Where once spawned the “binni”, king of the Iraqi table, now only scull small fish unfit for consumption.
“Our life is there”
Unable to act on its causes, some are trying to mitigate the consequences of the drought.
The French NGO Agronomists and Veterinarians Without Borders (AVSF), supported by French diplomacy, carries out support missions for fishermen and breeders.
That day, French veterinarians went to farms on the edge of the central marsh to train their Iraqi colleagues in diagnostic techniques on cows and buffaloes, which suffered in particular from water-related pathologies.
“We spent last summer distributing drinking water to supply animals and humans in the marshes,” says Hervé Petit, veterinarian and rural development expert for AVSF.
Because of the scarcity of water and reeds, many breeders are forced to “sell as many animals as possible at a derisory price, because of the law of supply and demand”, he continues. .
But civil society initiatives remain rare. The engineer Jassim al-Assadi is one of the few to fight to preserve the marshes by trying to alert the public authorities, in sometimes difficult conditions as water management is politicized.
At the Ministry of Water Resources, a spokesman Khaled Chemal, says that we are “working hard” to work towards the restoration of these wetlands. But when it comes to water supply, drinking water, water for domestic use and agriculture come first.
So many Marsh Arabs resign themselves to leaving for the cities – where they are often treated as pariahs.
In August 2022, the Iraqi branch of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) spoke of a “population exodus”, particularly to Basra or Baghdad.
Like Walid Khdeir, 30 years old. With his wife and six children, he left the marshes “four or five months ago” to settle a few kilometers away, in a permanent house in the town of Chibayich, at the crossroads of the marshes.
“It was difficult, our lives were there, like our grandparents before us. But what to do ? There is no more life” in the marshes, laments Walid Khdeir.
Today, the breeder wants to fatten his buffaloes to resell them. But here he is forced to buy at exorbitant prices the fodder that his cattle once found in abundance in the marshes.
“If the water comes back like before, we will go back to the swamps. Our life is there,” he says.