Iraqi buffalo herders wander in search of water

Like his father, Iraqi buffalo herder Watheq Abbas grazes his animals in Iraq’s southern wetlands, but with persistent drought shrinking marshland where they feed and decimating the herd, his millennia-old way of life is threatened.

“There’s no more water, the marshes are dead,” said 27-year-old Abbas, who has led his buffaloes to pasture in the marshland for the past 15 years.

“In the past, the drought would last one or two years, the water would return and the marshes would come back to life. Now we’ve gone without water for five years,” the buffalo herder told reporters.

This year has been one of the driest since 1933, authorities have said, with summer temperatures topping 50 degree celsius across Iraq, which is particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

The UNESCO-listed swamplands in the country’s south - where tradition has it that the biblical Garden of Eden was located - have sustained civilisations dating back to ancient Mesopotamia.

But the unrelenting dry spell has reduced the mythical waterways to a barren land of cracked earth, stripped of the slender reeds that once dominated the landscape.

Abbas and tens of thousands of Iraqis like him who rely on the marshes - livestock herders, hunters and fishermen -- have watched helplessly as their source of livelihood evaporated.

At the Chibayish marshes, scarce water still fills some channels, which authorities have deepened so that animals like Abbas’s 25 buffaloes could cool off.

For years, he and his herd have been on the move, heading wherever there was still water, in Chibayish or in the neighbouring province of Missan.

But it has become an increasingly challenging feat. Last year, seven of his animals died.

Just recently Abbas lost another of his buffaloes which drank stagnant, brackish water that he said had “poisoned it”.

The drought has been brought about by declining rainfall and soaring temperatures that increase evaporation.

But upstream dams built in Turkey and in Iran have dramatically reduced the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq and exacerbated the effects of climate change.

With the Iraqi government forced to ration water supply to ensure the country’s 46 million people have enough to drink and to meet agricultural needs, the marshes appear to be at the bottom of their priorities.

Agence France-Presse