Rivers and lakes that have nurtured communities since civilisation’s dawn are drying up, as drought leads to hunger, displacement and simmering conflict
mall gangs of buffaloes sat submerged in green and muddy waters. Their back ridges rose over the surface like a chain of black islets, spanning the Toos River, a tributary of the Tigris that flows into the Huwaiza marshes in southernWith their melancholic eyes, they gazed with defiance at an approaching boat, refusing to budge. Only when the boatman shrieked “heyy, heyy, heyy” did one or two reluctantly raise their haunches.
Under the scorching sun, the hot wind kicked tumbleweed across parched yellow earth, scarred with deep cracks and crumbling into thin dust under the feet. Rising above the ground were mounds of dead reed beds upon which the marsh dwellers had built their homes. A few relics of their former life lay scattered around: broken plastic buckets, some rusting metal pipe, and a kettle.
The drought is leading to the displacement of tens of thousands of people, pushing farmers to abandon their lands and move into the margins of big cities, settling in shanties on their outskirts, straining an already crumbling infrastructure and causing further destruction of agricultural lands and desertification.
The unique ecosystem functioned as a microclimate absorbing heat, with temperatures in the marshes up to 4C lower than in neighbouring areas, and the area was home to exceptional biodiversity.
“There are hundreds of illegal rivers diverting water towards the lands of influential people who use them for fish farms or irrigating their lands. We have lost 80% of the buffaloes because of mismanagement.” On the edge of one of these ponds, Abdul Sattar and his two sons took shelter from the oppressive heat in a small mud room, bare except for two reed mats on the dirt floor. An old air cooler clanked noisily outside the small window, churning in hot air.
He looked at his youngest son across the room, a 12-year-old asleep under a blanket in a feeble attempt to hide from the buzzing flies, and said his family were going hungry so he could feed the buffaloes to keep them alive, barely. “These animals, they mean a lot for us, they are like family. We pain when we see them wither and die in front of our eyes,” he said. “I swear if I knew how to do anything else I would, but me and my father, and his father before him, knew nothing but how to raise buffaloes.
He said that a few years ago, he came to realise that farming was dying in his village north of the Huwaiza marsh.levels were falling, and he had to use a diesel pump to irrigate his fields. “The money we got, we paid on gas for the water pumps. We were going hungry,” he said. “If you came here in the 90s, you wouldn’t be able to see Abadan,” said Ridha, a young farmer from the region, as he pointed at the gleaming towers of the Abadan refinery across the waterway.
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