Iraq’s Ancient Marshes Face Devastating Drought, Threatening Buffalo Herders’ Way of Life
At the Chibayish marshes, herders, fishermen, and hunters like Abbas are struggling to maintain their livelihoods. livestock continue to die from heat, disease, and drinking brackish water.
ERBIL (Kurdistan24) — Watheq Abbas, 27, has grazed his buffaloes in Iraq’s southern marshlands for 15 years, following the path of his father and generations before him. But persistent drought and shrinking waterways are threatening this millennia-old way of life.
“There’s no more water, the marshes are dead,” Abbas told AFP. “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.”
Authorities say 2025 has been one of the driest years since 1933, with summer temperatures soaring above 50°C across Iraq. The UNESCO-listed wetlands in the south, long considered the cradle of civilization and traditionally associated with the biblical Garden of Eden, have sustained human settlements for millennia. But the current drought has turned once-lush waterways into cracked earth, with reeds that once thrived on the marshes now withered.
Herders, fishermen, and hunters like Abbas are struggling to maintain their livelihoods. At the Chibayish marshes, scarce water is being deepened by authorities to allow animals such as Abbas’s 25 buffaloes to cool off. But mobility is increasingly difficult, and livestock continue to die from heat, disease, and drinking brackish water.
“The water does not renew, and salinity and pollution levels increase,” said veterinarian Wissam al-Assadi, who works with local herders in collaboration with a French NGO. “Animals that used to weigh 600 kilos are now 400 or 300 kilos, their immune systems weaken, and diseases multiply.”
The effects on Iraq’s Mesopotamian water buffaloes are stark: milk production has fallen to a third of normal levels, jeopardizing the production of cheese and geymar, a traditional thick clotted cream. A UN report in July warned that without urgent conservation, the buffalo population faces extinction, with numbers plummeting from 309,000 in 1974 to just 40,000 by 2000.
The crisis is fueled not only by declining rainfall and rising temperatures but also by upstream dams in Turkey and Iran, which have reduced the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates. With water rationed to meet the needs of Iraq’s 46 million people, the marshes remain a low priority for authorities.
“There's a battle for water,” said environmental activist Jassim al-Assadi of the NGO Nature Iraq, recalling efforts two decades ago to re-flood 5,600 square kilometers of marshland that had been drained under Saddam Hussein’s regime to target Shiite militants. Today, only about 800 square kilometers remain submerged, forcing many residents to leave the region.
For herders like Towayeh Faraj, 50, survival depends entirely on keeping their buffaloes alive. “If the livestock is alive, so are we,” he said. “We have nothing else: no salary, no jobs, no state support.” Faraj’s herd has shrunk from 120 to 30 animals, and with his children pursuing other professions, the family tradition may end with him.
The plight of Iraq’s southern marshes underscores the growing impact of climate change in the region and highlights the urgent need for conservation and sustainable water management to protect both the ecosystem and the communities that depend on it.
