It was published by Saddam Hussein's Baath Party or as it proclaims on page one by the "State Organisation for Tourism General Establishment for Travel and Tourism Services". And where did this booklet advise me to go? I quote: "And now, off to a unique world, the Marshes, where nature seems to preserve its virgin aspect. Miles and miles of water, with an endless variety of birds, of fish, of plants and reeds and bullrushes, dotted as far as the eye can see with huts, each a little island unto itself ..." Back in 1982, in the fleapit shop of one of Baghdad's seedier hotels, I bought a guidebook to Iraq. It was published by Saddam Hussein's Baath Party or as it proclaims on page one by the "State Organisation for Tourism General Establishment for Travel and Tourism Services". And where did this booklet advise me to go? I quote: "And now, off to a unique world, the Marshes, where nature seems to preserve its virgin aspect. Miles and miles of water, with an endless variety of birds, of fish, of plants and reeds and bullrushes, dotted as far as the eye can see with huts, each a little island unto itself ..." The first time I saw the Marshes, just east of the Baghdad-Basra highway, the tourist guide was true to its words.
For miles, thousands of reed huts stood on earth and papyrus islands, each inhabited by the descendants of the ancient Sumerians, a time warp of simplicity which, according to old Arabic scripts, may have begun with a devastating flood around AD620. The last time I went there, the women from one Marsh Arab village were prostituting themselves to lorry driversto make money for their impoverished families.Saddam and UN sanctions had seen to that. The Iraqi dictator probably began to drain the ancient marshlands in 1989, just a year before his invasion of Kuwait, and the officially stated explanation "security reasons" could not fail to hide its potential effect. For years, the Marsh Arabs were turning up in Kuwait and Iran with stories of dried up river-beds, of starvation and disease.
The man who rebuilt Babylon in his own image was destroying Sumeria.Indeed, it was his war with Iran which first drew Saddam's attention to the vulnerability of the Marsh Arabs and of his own army. It was here that Iran's Revolutionary Guards made their deepest penetration of Iraq in the 1980-88 Gulf war. When the first Iranian tanks crossed the Basra Highway a fact unrevealed by the Iraqi regime for all of eight months the Marsh Arabs were probably doomed. If they were not collaborating with Saddam's enemies, their homelands were Iraq responded by swamping the lagoons with mustard gas.
