By LTC Melanie Meier
As I looked outside the boundaries of Combined Operating Base Adder, my home away from home these past few months, I sigh. It is a sad site consisting of a pancake-flat horizon, which is brown, and holds nothing but dirt as far as the eye can see. Hard to imagine that the Garden of Eden was once a few miles from this very place and 5,000 years ago this area was covered with water, where homes built of reeds floated and water buffalo flourished.
Oddly enough, when I voiced these thoughts not long afterwards, my visitor that day told me he had actually flown over marshes and water buffalo. Based at Basrah, he had taken a short 20 minute helicopter flight southeast of here, and had flown over the marshes he claimed were returning. The marshes were even chronicled in the 1964 book The Marsh Arabs by the British writer, Wilfred Thesiger. That explained the mysterious cool breeze I enjoyed on the Basrah "layover" that occurred on my way back to COB Adder from my R&R leave last month. At the time I thought the breeze felt like it had traveled over water, but attributed it to the pure relief of getting out of the stuffy C-130.
Whether the breeze was imagined or not, I learned that as recently as the 1950s a half million Marsh Arabs lived within 8,000 square miles that formed the triangle of An Nasiriyah, Al Amarah, and Al Basrah. In the 1980s, Saddam Hussein reportedly used chemicals on the Iranians he thought were coming through the marshes and poisoned the water. In the 1990s, Hussein delivered the finishing blow to the marshes which had become a base for rebel attacks and a haven for refugees. He ordered helicopters to fire on the people, kill as many as they could, and drive off the remainder. A series of dams were erected and a great canal called the "Mother of all Battles River" was constructed to cut off and drain the waters from the Euphrates, which was the major water source. Once the marshes were dry, the reeds were set alight. With the marshes dry and no vegetation left, the silt turned to powdery fine dust and is now what we breathe every day here in Tallil. Some dusty days are worse than others.
Immediately after the US invasion in 2003, excited Iraqis tore down more than just statues of Saddam. Over 100 dams were destroyed in this region in an attempt to bring the marshes back to life. My friend from Basrah explained that some villagers have returned, but the people live with no paved roads, no electricity, no schools, and no medicine.
By now my curiosity had peaked so as soon as I could I turned to the Internet to see if I could learn more. What I discovered was that a new partnership called "The New Eden Team," was working to help the region recover from this manmade environmental disaster. The Team consists of Nature Iraq, which is an Iraqi non-governmental organization organized to protect, restore, and preserve the country's natural environment, various Iraqi Ministries and science communities, experts from Italy, and many concerned citizens who live in the southern Iraq region. This partnership estimates that 65% of the marshes have been reflooded and half of those have revegetated. Also approximately 80 bird species have returned.
Maybe someday visitors to Tallil will be able to see something other than this never-ending brown. Little hope exists for a return of the estimated eleven bird species and three mammal species that became extinct with the destruction of the marshes. However, Nature Iraq's website (www.natureiraq.org) reports the return of a threatened bird species call the Iraq babbler, and who knows, I just might catch sight of one rising out of reeds, rather than dust.
