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THE MARSH ARABS - HISTORY

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Bianca
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« Reply #15 on: August 14, 2007, 10:26:45 pm »

                                         






In mid-April [2003], a few days after Hussein's government fell, Ali Shaheen returned to his job as director of the Irrigation Department in Nasiriyah. Located about 25 miles northwest of Zayad, Nasiriyah was the scene of some of the heaviest fighting during the war. But with the hostilities over and Shiites firmly in control of the local government, he decided to try to reverse the damage Hussein had wrought. With a U.S. military escort, he drove to Garmat Bani Hassan, a town a mile away from Zayad. There, he ordered creaky metal gates on the Euphrates to be cranked open for the first time since 1991.

Shaheen, a short, balding civil engineer with a stubble-covered face, did the same thing with two other gates before embarking on a bigger engineering challenge – redirecting the Euphrates. He requisitioned several Irrigation Department bulldozers and smashed the dam Hussein had constructed to divert water to the Mother of All Battles River. For good measure, he had Hussein's river blocked off with a mountain of dirt.

He had no orders to redirect the rivers. There was no functioning Irrigation Ministry at the time. But he assumed he was doing what the Marsh Arabs wanted.

"Drying the marshes was a crime," said Shaheen, who joined the Irrigation Department in 1998, after the canals and dams were built. "I felt I needed to do whatever I could to restore what Saddam destroyed."

As the Euphrates returned to its original course, water surged toward Zayad and other villages on the western side of the marshes that are closest to the river's mouth. The arid flats were covered with more than three feet of water, swallowing the scrub brush and a few homes that were built after the marshes were dried.

Shaheen calculated that more than 1 quadrillion gallons – a 1 followed by 15 zeroes – were needed to fill the Euphrates side of the marshes. But the flow at Nasiriyah, which had been 106,000 gallons per second before 1991, was down to 21,000 gallons per second because of new dams and irrigation canals built in Iraq, Syria and Turkey over the past decade. "The water we have is not enough," he said.
« Last Edit: August 14, 2007, 10:28:25 pm by Bianca2001 » Report Spam   Logged

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