The Third River
In December 1992 Iraq opened a concrete-lined canal running some 565 kilometres (351 miles) from below Baghdad to the Gulf and called it the Third River. Within a decade satellite imagery showed roughly nine tenths of the Mesopotamian marshes gone — and then, in April 2003, the people who had lived in them went out with diggers and broke the embankments themselves.
The Main Outfall Drain runs for something like 565 kilometres (351 miles) between the Tigris and the Euphrates, from below Baghdad to the Shatt al-Basra, and it crosses the Euphrates on an aqueduct because the two waters must not mix. It was opened in December 1992 and given a name that put it in the company of the rivers it was built between: the Third River. On paper it is a piece of agricultural plumbing, and a defensible one. In practice it was completed at a particular moment, for a particular reason, and the wetland at the bottom of the country was largely gone within a decade.
What makes the marshes worth writing about is not the drainage. It is that the drainage was undone — not by a donor programme or a ministry, but by men with excavators and shovels in the weeks after the state that built the embankments stopped functioning. Almost nothing on this scale has ever been reversed by the people it was done to, and the reversal is now running into a problem that no amount of local determination can solve, because the water arrives from somewhere else.
The salt problem is real
Irrigated farming on a flat alluvial plain with a high water table concentrates salt. Water is spread on fields, evaporates in a fierce summer, and leaves its dissolved minerals behind; without drainage to carry them away, the soil eventually kills the crop. This is the oldest documented environmental problem in the world — the classic 1958 paper by Thorkild Jacobsen and Robert Adams read a shift from wheat to salt-tolerant barley out of third-millennium BC administrative tablets and connected it to falling yields on southern estates. The modern answer was drafted by a British consultant, Frank Haigh, in a 1951 report for the Iraqi government: a main drain down the spine of the plain to intercept saline field water and take it to the sea rather than back into the rivers. Work began in 1953, stopped, restarted, and stopped again. It was still unfinished in 1990.
What March 1991 changed
The uprising that followed the ceasefire in Kuwait reached fourteen of Iraq's eighteen governorates within a fortnight and was crushed by the end of April. In the south, army deserters and armed men withdrew into the marshes, which are the only terrain in that half of the country where a state cannot easily go — reed beds, shifting channels and villages reached by boat. What followed was a construction programme. Between 1991 and 1994 the government finished the Third River and built a set of new works alongside it with names that were not chosen to be subtle: the Mother of All Battles River, the Loyalty to the Leader Canal, the Glory River. Embankments diverted the Euphrates around the Hammar marsh; the Tigris distributaries that fed the central marshes were intercepted and carried away. Max van der Stoel, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iraq through the 1990s, reported on the drainage and on what was happening to the people in the reeds while it was under way. In 2001 the UN Environment Programme published a satellite comparison of the wetland against its 1970s extent and concluded that about nine tenths of it had been lost. Estimates of the original area run from roughly 15,000 to 20,000 square kilometres (5,800–7,700 sq mi) depending on the baseline and the season; the population figures are vaguer still, and are disputed.
The drainage was not a by-product of an agricultural scheme. The agricultural scheme supplied the engineering, the maps and the vocabulary; the politics supplied the deadline.
April 2003
Within weeks of the invasion, before any restoration programme existed and without waiting to be asked, local men opened the embankments. Some of it was done with hired excavators, some by hand, some by simply lifting sluice gates. Water went back into ground that had been dry for a decade, in a pattern nobody had planned and no hydrologist would have chosen. By the second half of the decade, in a wet year, something close to half the former extent was under water again, and reed, fish and buffalo came back faster than anyone had predicted. Azzam Alwash, an Iraqi engineer who had left in 1978 and returned in 2003, built the organisation that turned the improvisation into monitoring and design work — Nature Iraq — and was given the Goldman Environmental Prize for it in 2013. The point about that story is the order of events. The restoration was not delivered to the marshes. It was begun by them and documented afterwards.
Getting it on the lists
Iraq then did the slow institutional work. It acceded to the Ramsar Convention — in force for Iraq from February 2008 — and named the Hawizeh marshes — the one component that had never fully dried, straddling the Iranian border — as its first wetland of international importance. In July 2016 UNESCO inscribed the Ahwar of Southern Iraq as a mixed World Heritage property: four marsh areas together with the ruins of Ur, Uruk and Eridu, on the argument that the cities and the wetland are one landscape and that the marshes are what is left of the environment those cities were built in. It is a rare listing to hold both halves, and for a country whose heritage news for twenty years had been looting and demolition, it was a deliberate change of subject.
The water is upstream
None of which puts water in a marsh. Iraq sits at the bottom of both rivers and controls the headwaters of neither. Turkey has been building on the Tigris and Euphrates inside its own territory since the 1970s under the Southeastern Anatolia Project, and the reservoir behind its last big dam on the Tigris was filled across 2019 and 2020, which were already drought years downstream. Iran has dammed and diverted the tributaries that fed Hawizeh from the east and embanked its own side of that marsh, severing the two halves. There is no treaty allocating either river. Iraq ratified the UN Watercourses Convention in 2001 and has argued the downstream case in those terms ever since; the upstream states have not joined it, and the convention has no mechanism that would make them. Meanwhile the winters since 2020 have mostly failed, and reservoir storage inside Iraq has repeatedly fallen to a fraction of capacity.
What a marsh needs that a flood does not supply
Re-flooding restored area. It could not restore the flood pulse — the spring surge of snowmelt from Anatolia and the Zagros that used to push through the marshes and out to the Gulf, flushing salt with it. Dams upstream exist precisely to flatten that pulse, so what reaches the wetland now is a smaller, steadier, saltier flow, and a marsh that is not flushed becomes a shallow saline pan. The consequence at the far end is the Shatt al-Arab: when river discharge drops, seawater pushes inland up the channel, and across the second half of 2018 the water supplied to Basra put, by Human Rights Watch's count, at least 118,000 people in hospital and brought the city onto the streets. Buffalo herders in the central marshes have sold animals they could not water; households that came back after 2003 have left again for Nasiriyah and Basra. The residents rebuilt the marsh in a single season with their own machinery, and what is now taking it apart is not a policy anyone in Iraq voted for and not one Iraq can repeal — it is the sum of decisions made in catchments upstream, and a run of winters that did not arrive.