A Greenly Story · Southern Iraq

The marshes that came back

Where the Tigris and the Euphrates meet lies one of the largest wetlands in the Middle East. In a single lifetime it was drained to a tenth of its size, brought back, named a World Heritage Site, and pushed to the edge again by drought.

Told alongside Greenly’s feature with Nature Iraq · Every figure sourced

Thousands of years

Where two rivers meet

Before the Tigris and the Euphrates join to become the Shatt al-Arab, they spread into a maze of reed beds, lakes and channels: the Ahwar, or Mesopotamian Marshes.

Some of the world’s first cities, Ur, Uruk and Eridu, grew up at their edge.5 For generations the Marsh Arabs have lived on the water, building homes from reeds and raising water buffalo.

1970s

Almost 9,000 square kilometres

In the 1970s the permanent marshes covered almost 9,000 km².2 Counting the land that flooded each spring, the wetlands stretched across 15,000 to 20,000 km², bigger than Qatar.1

1970s – 1990s

Dams, then drainage

Dams and reservoirs built upstream for flood control and hydroelectricity cut the yearly floods that fed the marshes. Then in the 1990s, Iraq’s government drained large areas, at least in part to punish the tribes living there.3

2002

760 square kilometres left

By 2002 the marshes had dwindled to about 760 km².2 The UN Environment Programme had already warned that close to 90% of the marshlands were gone.1 The largest surviving piece was the Hawizeh marsh on the border with Iran.3

With the water went the fish, the reeds, and the way of life of the families who depended on them.

2003

The water comes back

After the 2003 war, restoration began and water was let back into the drained basins. Within a year, large areas north and south of the Euphrates had been reflooded.3

That same year, Azzam Alwash returned to Iraq and founded what would become Nature Iraq.7

2005

39% reflooded

By September 2005, 39% of the marshes’ former extent had been reflooded.4

2006

More than half, and life returning

A UN Environment Programme assessment in 2006 found roughly 58% of the mid-1970s marsh area restored, with standing water and reasonably dense vegetation. Researchers recorded native plants and animals re-establishing themselves at a remarkable rate.3

2016

A World Heritage Site

UNESCO added the Ahwar of Southern Iraq to its World Heritage List: four marsh areas together with the ancient cities of Uruk, Ur and Eridu, recognised as a refuge of biodiversity in one of the driest regions on Earth.5

2023

Drought, again

Dams upstream, lower river flows and years of drought and extreme heat have brought the water down again. In July 2023 the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization said almost 70% of the marshes were without water.6

Today

Reflooding, not restoring

Azzam Alwash doesn’t call this work “restoration”. As he explained to Greenly, the spring flood pulse that once fed the marshes has been permanently changed by dams upstream. Nature doesn’t return to a fixed past, it adapts, so what is happening here is reflooding.7

Read Greenly’s conversation with Azzam Alwash → See Nature Iraq on the partner map →

Why this matters beyond Iraq

The marshes show two things at once. Wetlands can come back faster than anyone expected once water returns. And they depend on decisions made hundreds of kilometres upstream, in other countries, about dams, farming and water. The same questions of shared rivers and scarce water run through the whole region, including the UAE.

The full conversationAzzam Alwash on 25 years of reflooding, water diplomacy and what it all has to do with Dubai. The UAE’s own water mathWhy the UAE uses fourteen times the freshwater nature replaces, in one chart.

Sources

  1. UN Environment Programme (2001). The Mesopotamian Marshlands: Demise of an Ecosystem (UNEP/DEWA/TR.01-3), as reported by UN News, May 2001.
  2. UN News (7 December 2006), reporting UNEP’s marshlands project: “Once totalling almost 9,000 square kilometres, the Marshlands dwindled to just 760 square kilometres in 2002.”
  3. NASA Earth Observatory, World of Change: Mesopotamia Marshes, including its summary of the 2006 UNEP assessment.
  4. Richardson, C. J. & Hussain, N. A. (2006). Restoring the Garden of Eden. BioScience, as summarised by ScienceDaily, May 2006.
  5. UNESCO World Heritage Centre, The Ahwar of Southern Iraq: Refuge of Biodiversity and the Relict Landscape of the Mesopotamian Cities (inscribed 2016).
  6. UN Food and Agriculture Organization, as reported by The National, 11 July 2023: “Almost 70 per cent of the marshes are devoid of water.”
  7. Greenly, Reflooding, Not Restoring: Azzam Alwash on 25 Years of the Iraqi Marshes (August 2026), based on a recorded conversation and summarized rather than transcribed.
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