Peering beyond the towering reedbeds, Abbas Al-Mousawi watches his buffaloes drink from the putrid waters of the Chibayish marsh. Each sip his animals take raises his anxiety. “It’s almost impossible to find a clean pool here,” says the 45-year-old breeder as he paddles his mashouf – a traditional boat similar to a canoe. “The water is just bad. It gushes out of waste pipes into the swamp. It’s disgusting.” 

Mousawi and his animals live in the Mesopotamian Marshes, a fabled corner of Iraq known throughout the ages as a waterway that could sustain man and beast and populations across the country’s southern deserts. Until recent decades, it offered a vast and reliable supply of water, the end of the line for Iraq’s two great rivers after their epic journeys through Turkey, Syria and Iraq’s deserts.

But, perhaps more than any other time in history, the marshes are in peril. Prolonged drought, regional standoffs, political negligence and climate change are combining to create intolerable stress on one of the region’s most important ecosystems.

What was once a pristine waterway is now a toxic wasteland. Whatever water reaches the marshes is considered a public health risk. The United Nations has classified Iraq as the fifth-most vulnerable country in the world to climate change. The effects have been clear over the past 15 years, with lower rainfalls, and longer and hotter heat waves. In some years, water has barely covered 30 percent of the original wetlands, which were replaced by dry cracking earth that locals had never seen before.