Reflooding, Not Restoring: Azzam Alwash on 25 Years of the Iraqi Marshes

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Azzam Alwash didn't set out to spend twenty-five years on this. When he returned to Iraq in 2003 and founded what would become Nature Iraq, he expected the work to take a fraction of that. Instead, restoring the Mesopotamian Marshes turned into the defining project of his life, and even now, he told me, he's still not calling it finished.

A Country Drier Than He Remembered

Alwash described the shock of arriving back in Iraq in 2003 to find the marshes far drier than he remembered from before he'd left. There was hope in the air at the time, he said, but the scale of what had been lost was still difficult to absorb. What followed was two and a half decades of learning just how hard it is to implement environmental solutions, even when you already know what needs to be done.

Why "Reflooding" and Not "Restoration"

One distinction Alwash was firm about: he doesn't call what's happening in the marshes "restoration." He prefers the word reflooding, and the difference isn't just semantic. The natural flood pulse that used to drive the marsh ecosystem, fed by spring snowmelt from the mountains upstream, has been permanently disrupted by dams built further up the rivers. That disruption has pushed the marshes from a freshwater system toward a brackish one, changing the ecological balance at its foundation.

Nature, he argued, doesn't restore itself to some fixed past state. It adapts, on timescales far longer than a human life, and what looks like restoration from where we're standing is really just nature continuing to adjust to a changed world. He's confident that, given enough time, natural cycles will reassert themselves regardless of how much humans try to control them, pointing to how quickly marsh ecosystems in both Iraq and Palestine rebounded once water flow was returned to them.

Turning a Water Crisis Into a Peace Plan

Some of the most striking parts of the conversation had nothing to do with the marshes directly. Alwash laid out an idea for regional water diplomacy: Iraq's water storage systems are outdated and lose enormous volumes to evaporation, while Turkey's upstream dams hold water more efficiently. His proposal is for Iraq to lease storage capacity in a Turkish dam, cutting evaporation losses while creating an economic relationship between the two countries built on water and energy trade, one he thinks could eventually extend cooperation into Eastern Europe.

He extended the idea further, to a regional solar energy economy linking Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Oman. Solar panels in the region, he said, can produce roughly three times the output of equivalent panels in Germany, for the same installation cost, simply because of how many more sunlit hours the region gets. His pitch: a future where the Middle East exports solar energy the way it once exported oil, and where that economic interdependence becomes a quieter, more durable route to regional stability than politics alone has managed.

What's Left of the Marsh Arab Way of Life

I asked how Marsh Arab communities compare to twenty years ago. Alwash was candid: their traditional way of life, while romantic from the outside, was never an easy one, and he's genuinely uncertain whether it can survive in its full, authentic form going forward. He raised the idea of preserving it through documentation, museums and records, the way other historical ways of life have been preserved elsewhere, rather than assuming it will simply continue as it was.

What shouldn't be lost, he said, is the ecological knowledge embedded in that traditional lifestyle, centuries of living in balance with a difficult environment. He sees that knowledge as something humanity may urgently need again, particularly if climate change forces harder adaptations in the decades ahead.

Why He Hasn't Quit

This was the hardest part of the conversation. Alwash described real, direct danger tied to his work: raids on Nature Iraq's offices, the arrest of officers, and the kidnapping and torture of one of his assistants by authorities suspicious that the organization's environmental work was cover for foreign interference.

He told me quitting was never really an option. Walking away, in his view, would confirm the very suspicion driving that pressure, that NGOs are outside actors working against the country's interests, and it would abandon both the mission and the people who depend on it. He continues the work alongside a younger generation at Nature Iraq who, he says, remain committed despite the risk, and he sees that persistence itself as part of what proves the work is legitimate and locally rooted, not foreign-driven.

What This Has to Do With Dubai

Alwash connected his work back to where I'm writing from. He pointed out that Dubai's economy, built on oil, sits on top of an older economy built on pearl trading, before oil was ever discovered in the region. His point wasn't nostalgic, it was a warning: extreme heat projected for Dubai in the coming decades could make summers in the city far harder to live through without serious environmental intervention starting now, not later.

He was also blunt about generational responsibility. His generation, he said, is handing the next one a difficult position, like inheriting a game already deep in deficit. But he pointed to AI and new tools as something that could genuinely help younger people tackle inherited problems more effectively than his generation could. His advice for Greenly specifically was practical: keep the site updated with fresh ideas, and lean into video and multimedia, since younger audiences engage with that far more than text alone.