Water buffalo gently glide through shallow water canals that snake throughout Iraq’s southern Mesopotamian Marshes, their black skin glistening under the country’s relentless summer heat. Dried and cracked earth expands into the distance, colliding with the blazing sun. An abandoned wooden boat lies stranded on crumbling soil.
Just a few months ago, this desolate landscape was a freshwater lagoon. Now devastation has overtaken development.
“We’ve been raising buffalo here since the time of Adam,” proclaims seventy-three-year-old Argeol Issa Omarah, one of the numerous buffalo breeders — known as Ma’dan — who inhabit Iraq’s Mesopotamian Marshes, which many biblical scholars believe to be the site of the Garden of Eden. Both the Mesopotamian Marshes and the culture of the Ma’dan were granted UNESCO World Heritage status in 2016.
“When I was growing up, there was water as far as the eye could see,” Omarah says. “Green grass was everywhere and the water was pure and clean.”
These wetlands in the southern part of the country were once among the world’s most unique landscapes, nurturing an ancient culture that survived here for millennia. The Tigris and Euphrates rivers, flowing from southern Turkey through Syria and Iraq, met at the Shatt al-Arab River near Basra, creating vast marshlands in Iraq and Iran. Seasonal flooding transformed the region into an interconnected network of wetlands.
Life in these remote marshes endured undisturbed for thousands of years, largely inaccessible to outsiders. The isolation ended in the 1980s with the Iran-Iraq War, followed by the Gulf War and the Shia Uprising in the early 1990s. What followed was a deliberate and near total destruction of the marshes.
Auteur: Jaclynn Ashly
