Southern Iraq S Marshes

The Mesopotamian marshes are important for economic, social, and biodiversity values and have been home to indigenous human communities for millennia. They are regarded as a legendary site. This multi-authored book contains chapters written by world-renowned experts in their field. Both basic and applied information are made available, making the book a must-have for a wide spectrum of users. For example, an understanding of the natural and the social aspects of the marshes, as described here, is an obvious prerequisite for a pest management plan in this area. Scholars interested in wetlands can use this book as a guide to compare different wetlands areas in Asia. The bibliography section contains valuable references to the marsh areas and research in the field. This book serves as an up-to-date comprehensive source of information on different aspects of the southern marshes of Iraq and is aimed at academic scholars, environmentalists, and decision makers.

This text is for those wishing to develop an understanding of a cultural legacy and lifestyle that survives today only as a fragmented cultural inheritance. The book illustrates how the economy and lives of the Ma'dan (Marsh Arabs) that spans over 5000 years remained similar to the ancient practices of their Sumerian forebears.

The gripping history of the devastation and resurrection of the Marshes of Iraq, an environmental treasure of the Middle East, now a protected site The Mesopotamian Marshes in southern Iraq, once the largest wetland system on the planet, have been inhabited for thousands of years by the Ma‘dan, or Marsh Arabs, but they remain remote, isolated, and virtually unknown. In the early 1990s, the Saddam Hussein regime drained the Marshes and set out to destroy not only a critical ecosystem but a unique way of life as well. It stands as one of the greatest environmental and humanitarian disasters of the twentieth century. In the wake of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, local residents destroyed the earthen dams built to divert water from the wetlands and the Marshes were reflooded. Their future, however, is in peril. The Ghosts of Iraq’s Marshes tells the history of the creation, destruction, and revitalization of the Marshes and their inhabitants against the backdrop of the dramatic events that have convulsed Iraq in the past fifty years. It follows the life of Jassim al-Asadi, an irrigation engineer who was jailed and tortured under Saddam Hussein and who subsequently dedicated his life to the reflooding and restoration of the Marshes. He eventually contributed to the Marshes being declared a UNESCO World Heritage site. Jassim is eminently relatable, and the stories of his life and other marsh dwellers are infused with pathos, tragedy, humor, and passion.

Contains 17 contributions addressing the many human and environmental dimensions of the assault on the Iraqi marshlands by the government of Saddam Hussein during the 1980s and 1990s. This volume is based on the second and final report on the Marshlands and Marsh Dwellers of Southern Mesopotamia.

This important account investigates the ruin of the Mesopotamian marshes--historically one of the world's most important wetland environments--along with the decimation of an area inhabited, since the time of the Sumerians, by thousands of people living on artificial islands of mud and reeds and depending on sustainable fishing and farming. Located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in southern Iraq, the history of this important ecological and unique cultural jewel, which was destroyed under Saddam Hussein's reign through a series of constructed dams and water diversions designed to eradicate the remaining marsh dwellers, is analyzed at length. Interspersed with ancient Mesopotamian inscriptions and Old Testament quotations, this is a sobering account of the deliberate destruction of an environment for the purpose of ethnic cleansing. Features * Presents over 30 rare, never before published photographs from the 1934 anthropology expedition to the marshlands * Includes essays by photographer Nik Wheeler, human rights advocate Baroness Emma Nicholson, author Rasheed Al-Khayoun and ecologist Robert France about the present state of the marshlands * Contains more than 20 photographs of Mesopotamian artifacts from the Harvard collection

An adventurous diplomat’s “engrossing and often darkly humorous” memoir of working with Iraqis after the fall of Saddam Hussein(Publishers Weekly). In August 2003, at the age of thirty, Rory Stewart took a taxi from Jordan to Baghdad. A Farsi-speaking British diplomat who had recently completed an epic walk from Turkey to Bangladesh, he was soon appointed deputy governor of Amarah and then Nasiriyah, provinces in the remote, impoverished marsh regions of southern Iraq. He spent the next eleven months negotiating hostage releases, holding elections, and splicing together some semblance of an infrastructure for a population of millions teetering on the brink of civil war. The Prince of the Marshes tells the story of Stewart’s year. As a participant he takes us inside the occupation and beyond the Green Zone, introducing us to a colorful cast of Iraqis and revealing the complexity and fragility of a society we struggle to understand. By turns funny and harrowing, moving and incisive, it amounts to a unique portrait of heroism and the tragedy that intervention inevitably courts in the modern age.

Dr Salim, of Bagdad University, spent two years amongst the remarkable tribal peoples who inhabit the great marshes of the lower Euphrates. He describes their social and economic organization and discusses on the one hand the process by which people with bedouin traditions and values have adapted themselves to different and difficult conditions, and on the other the effects upon them of submission to the central government and the modernisation of their modes of life that has resulted from it. His account offers a fascinating study of people living in an unusual environment, and will be of value to the anthropologist and ethnologist for its precise ethnography. At the same time, as one of the few detailed studies of the changes now being wrought on such a large scale by modern economic and political forces, it has real importance for the general student of contemporary Middle Eastern affairs.

What can the present tell us about the past? From 1968 to 1990, Edward Ochsenschlager conducted ethnoarchaeological fieldwork near a mound called al-Hiba, in the marshes of southern Iraq. In examining the material culture of three tribes—their use of mud, reed, wood, and bitumen, and their husbandry of cattle, water buffalo, and sheep—he chronicles what is now a lost way of life. He helps us understand ancient manufacturing processes, an artifact's significance and the skill of those who create and use it, and the substantial moral authority wielded by village craftspeople. He reveals the complexities involved in the process of change, both natural and enforced. Al-Hiba contains the remains of Sumerian people who lived in the marshes more than 5,000 years ago in a similar ecological setting, using similar material resources. The archaeological evidence provides insights into everyday life in antiquity. Ochsenschlager enhances the comparisons of past and present by extensive illustrations from his fieldwork and also from the University Museum's rare archival photographs taken in the late nineteenth century by John Henry Haynes. This was long before Saddam Hussein drove one of the tribes from the marshes, forced the Bedouin to live elsewhere, and irrevocably changed the lives of those who tried to stay.