2005
8 March 2005. For
Iraq's Great Marshes, a Hesitant Comeback. By JAMES
GLANZ for The New York Times. Excerpt: ABU
SUBAT, Iraq, March 1 - ....A dike that Saddam
Hussein's government finished nine years ago
had drained this marsh, once part of an incomparable
ecosystem spread across 7,000 square miles
of southern Iraq that Mr. Hussein systematically
destroyed. After sealing this dike, the
government gave families 24 hours to leave
and never come back, Mr. Hashim said. The
ruined houses were left sitting on dusty
little hills in a barren and bone-dry desert....
But when Mr. Hussein's government fell in
April 2003, villagers went to the dike and
gouged holes in it using shovels, their
bare hands and at least one piece of heavy
equipment, a floating backhoe. Since then,
something miraculous has occurred: reeds
and cattails have sprouted up again; fish,
snails and shrimp have returned to the waters;
egrets and storks perch on the jagged remains
of the walls, coolly surveying the territory
as if they had never left.... Mr. Hussein's
obsessive and vindictive drainage program,
in fact, was intended to obliterate this
prime refuge for deserters from his army
and the southern Shiite guerrillas, many
of them marsh Arabs who fought his government
long before the Americans arrived.... The
scientists reported that less than 10 percent
of the original marshes still function as
true wetlands, but that about 20 percent
of the original area had been reflooded
by March 2004, according to satellite imagery.
High salt content in soil and water, threatens
the recovery of the marshes in certain areas,
the paper said. As Dr. Hussain's team pulled
up muck and spinachlike aquatic plants from
the bottom of this marsh for testing, he
confirmed the problems and said the thickets
of reeds in this marsh were still only about
half as dense as they had been before the
marsh dried up. Some plants, like water
lilies, had not come back at all, he said. |
