A
rare piece of welcome news from the Iraqi marshes.
Iraq's southern marshlands -- nearly ruined under the Saddam Hussein regime -- have been making a "phenomenal" recovery, a U.N. agency said Wednesday
The U.N. Environmental Program said the wetlands, which had been regarded as "a key natural habitat for people, wildlife and fisheries," have bounced back to about 40 percent of the area they covered in the 1970s.[...]
The region had been "damaged significantly since the 1970s, due to upstream dam construction and drainage operations" by the former regime, according to the U.N. Environmental Program.
But after the toppling of the Saddam regime, officials embarked on restoration and people "began opening floodgates and breaching embankments in order to bring water back into the marshlands."
Some scholars have called the region located in and around Basra, Thiqar and Maysan provinces the biblical Garden of Eden.
Also, it had been home to a 5,000-year-old civilization called "heirs of the Babylonians and Sumerians" and to "rare and unique species like the Sacred Ibis, and a spawning ground for Gulf fisheries."
The UNEP issued a report on Wednesday that includes analysis and satellite imagery of the turnaround. The conclusions are derived by the Iraqi Marshlands Observation System, started a year ago with funding from Japan.
The project is designed to help Iraq manage and monitor the wetlands, help the environment, and "provide clean drinking water for up to 100,000 people living in or near the marshland."
[...]
UNEP said that four years ago, it "alerted the world" to the marshland crisis.
"Totaling almost 9,000 square kilometers of permanent wetlands, the Iraqi marshlands dwindled to just 760 square kilometers in 2002. As of August 2005, IMOS shows them covering almost 3,500 square kilometers, approximately 37 per cent of the former 1970s extent. In spring 2005 the figure was nearer to 50 per cent, shrinking with the high summer evaporation rates.
A Human Rights Watch briefing paper published in January 2003 said the Marsh Arabs, had numbered around 250,000 people "as recently as 1991" but were "believed to number fewer than 40,000 in their ancestral homeland."
Of course the Iraqis are getting this back at the cost of having depleted uranium and unexploded bombs littering their landscape, but at least they are getting something in return.