Qualla: Hawizeh Marshes

Hawizeh Marshes: Introduction

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

From the air, the Hawizeh Marshes look like the Earth forgot to finish itself here. Vast sheets of shallow water stretch across the border between Iraq and Iran, interrupted by islands of green reeds tall enough to hide a standing person. Narrow channels wind between them, traced by the wakes of slim wooden boats called mashoofs. This is not wilderness. People have lived in these marshes for over 5,000 years, building houses from bundled reeds, raising water buffalo, and navigating a landscape that is neither land nor lake but something between the two. The Hawizeh is the survivor among the Mesopotamian Marshes, the one fragment of what was once the largest wetland ecosystem in western Eurasia that never completely dried out, not even when a dictator tried to drain it all.

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Hawizeh Marshes: Where the Rivers Built a World

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Around 3000 BC, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flooded the low-lying plains of southern Mesopotamia and created something new. The marshes that formed were not stagnant pools but a flowing system, fed by the Al-Musharrah and Al-Kahla branches of the Tigris on the Iraqi side and ...

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Hawizeh Marshes: The Deliberate Drowning

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In the early 1990s, Saddam Hussein's government began systematically draining the Mesopotamian Marshes. The official justification was to flush out armed opposition groups believed to be hiding in the wetlands. The real effect was the displacement of more than 200,000 Marsh Arabs...

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Hawizeh Marshes: A Culture Written in Reeds

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The marsh communities exist in a kind of parallel world. No hard border separates the Iraqi and Iranian sides of the Hawizeh. Families paddle mashoofs between countries as casually as crossing a street. The cities they built sit on water, clusters of reed structures that have no ...

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Hawizeh Marshes: Reclamation and New Threats

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

After the 2003 Iraq War, the new government reopened water flows to the drained marshes. Water returned to the Central and Hammar marshes, and displaced communities began filtering back. In 2007, Iraq became a signatory to the Ramsar Convention, and the Hawizeh Marshes were desig...

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