Drought imperils Iraq's 'Garden of Eden' marshes, an ancient culture

"I have no work. Our livestock have died. Our children have left school because we don't have money to buy them clothes," said fisherman Yasir Razaq. He spoke in front of his wooden boat, which sat on a dried-up lake bed in the Hor al-Hammar marsh near Nasiriyah, 200 miles south of Baghdad.

The Marsh Arab culture existed for more than 5,000 years in the 8,000 square miles of wetlands fed by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The marshes boasted hundreds of species of birds and fish, and periodic flooding created fertile farm lands.

The flooded, flat plain is said to have played an important role in the development of an agriculture-based culture that helped raise civilization to new heights. Some biblical scholars identified the vast marshes - the most extensive wetlands in the Middle East - as the site of the fabled Garden of Eden.

But after the 1991 Gulf War, the marshes became a casualty of Iraq's religiously based politics.

Hussein, a Sunni Muslim, considered the thousands of mostly Shi'ite Marsh Arabs to be disloyal - first in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and more seriously when Shi'ites in southern Iraq rose up against his regime after a US-led coalition forced the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait.

Many Shi'ite rebels hid among the Marsh Arabs in the forests of reeds and myriad of lakes. To punish them, Hussein built a massive network of dams and earthen walls to divert water and dry the marshes.

The effect was devastating.

By the time Hussein was overthrown in 2003, the marshes had shrunk by 90 percent from their size in the 1970s, when they had covered nearly 3,500 square miles - larger than Delaware.

Many experts direly predicted that the marshes might disappear entirely by 2008.

The United Nations launched an $11 million project to restore the marshes, including removing some of the barriers that were keeping water from flowing.

And by 2006, more than half the original marshlands had successfully flooded.

"Our ministry right from beginning . . . started considering the restoration of the marshes area to be our priority," said Iraq's water resources minister, Abdul-Latif Jamal Rasheed, adding that the effort had achieved some success.