"Marsh Arabs reclaim paradise"

"Marsh Arabs reclaim paradise"

QUOTE
NEAR an abandoned hotel in the southern Iraqi town of Qurnah, history’s most notorious tree stands stunted and withered in a bed of concrete. On its now barkless limbs, it is said, once hung the Apple of Wisdom that fatally tempted Eve, back when this part of ancient Mesopotamia was better known as the Garden of Eden.

A decade ago, mankind squandered a paradise here a second time - when Saddam Hussein began draining the marshes that surrounded Qurnah for hundreds of miles on either side. Within a few years, the largest wetlands in west Asia evaporated into desert, along with it the 5,000-year-old hunting, boating, fishing lifestyle of 400,000 Marsh Arabs. Today, what was a proud, unique waterborne culture lives in vast slums of squats and cheap rented houses on the outskirts of the provincial capital, Basra.
UNQUOTE

It can never become the marshes that Wilfred Thesiger wrote about, but it still must be preserved.