A dilapidated room made with local cement or mud and when you gaze upon the roof, all you can see is a greyish tin roof. the door is made of cloth or a reed mat. There is no water, power, or other infrastructure. The room is scorching in one of the world's hottest places. There are millions of Iraqis living there. Chickens, lambs, buffaloes, and other animals will be roaming around the room. You may even see a donkey whose sole purpose is to deliver waste that will be sold later. These suffocating chambers are referred to as "Al- Ashwa'iat." They are essentially houses erected illegally on abandoned projects, riverbanks, or neighborhood yards.

For some, immigration to the city was a necessity due to years of strife and dry, nearly-dead land. As a result of the massive number of people who have migrated and the disintegration of pastoral traditions and lifestyles, a crisis has emerged. Unlike in the 1950s, when the crisis was more visible in Baghdad, the crisis is now concentrated in Basra. The cycle of violence does not appear to be breaking in a society where neoliberal policies have become commonplace. Every day, social media platforms direct the public's rage at immigrants, inciting violence and expelling them from cities, which, unsurprisingly, were followed by security concerns and new laws. Authorities continue to use immigration to justify their dysfunctional system. They depict immigration as a problem but do nothing to provide a solution. Because it benefits them, they could ignite a class war, dragging the underclass even deeper into hell instead of working to provide a better system for the people. In order to fully understand this problem as a whole, we need to know its history.

Ahwari migration

The Ahwari migration began following the Mesopotamia campaign, a WWI campaign in the Middle East conducted by the British Empire and its allies against the Ottoman Empire. Iraq has thus become an enemy to the marsh Arabs. The Ahwari migration is regarded as an unavoidable consequence of the economic and political factors that shaped Iraq's relationship with Ahwar and its people. Eastern Baghdad was teeming with immigrants in the early days of the Iraqi kingdom, most of whom fled to escape the feudal system. Despite this, the Ahwari migration is not conducted in conjunction with the issues of forced displacement and the feudal system's tragic history. 

"Shrogs are the poorest of the poor." H. Batatu. (1978), The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq. By "shrogs," he refers to the derogatory term used against marsh Arabs. Their migration has continued to the present day, resulting in housing blocks that mimic a city or a "small city" located close to the larger one. Batatu further stated that their tragic anguish was certainly one of the key elements that contributed to civil strife in the July 14 revolution that overthrew the monarchy. Due to their inability to pay rent, the Ahwari people inhabited arid lands. They are famished and must watch as at least two out of every five children die as a result of starvation.

They are abused by the cops and have over 16,000 Sarifa (a house made of Reed mat)  In addition to around 27,000 mud houses that formed "al Sara'if city" in 1956, It was constructed in 1959 to become Al- Thaora city (City of revolution) and then carried the political changes with it to finally become Sadr City, the bloodiest city in Iraq's modern history.

Men worked in "descending" jobs that city residents did not, and women sold food and dairy goods; in the best-case scenario, there was insufficient food. The royal government took advantage of these laborers and recruited them into police units, benefiting from their animosity toward the city people. their districts are infested with deadly illnesses, and the government did nothing. In fact, Al Sara'if City was founded on the site of a human and animal waste dump. It didn't take long for Baghdadis to protest about the number of illnesses that were being carried to them and demand a solution.

This reminds me of something I read about how the number of "Tribal Dakka; which is a sort of vengeance performed by a certain tribe. For example, if a member of tribe A murders a member of tribe B, tribe B will revenge their member by punishing a member of tribe A. The tribe Dakka is common in Al- Ahwar. According to what I heard, this phenomenon has lessened in Basmaya city owing to its horizontal construction. According to the press, it's a good thing that such things only happen to the underclass and immigrants, who live in a separate world that everyone has given up on. Batatu describes an incident he witnessed while working on research. He spoke with a handful of officers from all across Sara'if, and one of them says, "Dude! We simply want to live. A few months ago, a man killed his neighbor near my house for stealing two tomatoes! Let me tell you, if you feed me, you're as valuable to me as my father!" 

Other people also tackled this issue, “In 1936, while in Morocco, I visited a large slum on the outskirts of Casablanca, known to the French as Bidonville, where indigent Berbers existed in hovels made from flattened petrol tins. They had originally come to Casablanca from their mountain villages during the boom years after the First World War when there was a great demand for labor. Then, in the thirties, came the slump. At the time of my visit, these Berbers scavenged around the gutters for scraps to keep themselves alive and were dying in scores of starvation. In Iraq, many of the immigrants left their villages to escape the tyranny of the sheiks. But in Baghdad or Basra, they encountered the police. Having set up their mat shelters among a clutter of others on wasteland inside the city, they began to feel at home until the police arrived with orders to clear the site. "Where are we going to go ?" 'Anywhere, but don't stay here. Go back to your villages if you don't like it here. Come on, pull down that house. Hurry! We are busy. ' So, with difficulty, they would move their possessions to another site, and again the police would shift them. If they settled on the outskirts, they had to spend money they could ill afford on bus fares to and from work. The authorities, alarmed by this mass immigration, were anxious to stop it and encouraged the police, who in any case regarded these rustics as fair game, to harass them. "Show me your discharge papers." You have not got any? Then come with me to the police station. ' In Iraq, every man was supposed to serve two years in the army, but very few of the immigrants had done so. I was staying once with Falih when a stout middle-aged captain arrived at the mudhif, accompanied by a sergeant and two privates with a mass of files. Falih had been warned of the visit and been asked to have the conscripts ready. It was July and very hot. The captain and his staff gratefully accepted drinks of sherbet and lime tea. "W. Thesiger. (1964). The Marsh Arabs.

Al-Thawra city

Al-Thawra City is now known as Al-Sadr City, with its residential sectors built in 1959 with similar neighborhoods of the same design throughout Iraq a year after the establishment of the Iraqi Republic, which became an event that represented a subjective transition for a group that had suffered oppression at the hands of the royal government and British colonialism and liberation from the regime. The Oqtay, who was the major cause of their departure from their historical territory, may not have been the beginning of the establishment of this stratification of a distinct ethnic group at the end 

of the nineteenth century. But, as the primary authority of a British colonial government, "Shroog" became a displaced class that undertook the menial and humiliating job that the city's citizens did not undertake, such as service and hard labor, in the early twentieth century. Previously, this group was restricted to working among the chiefs and in their society, which for a long time was based on this arrangement in the shadow of an agricultural economy, but after immigration, this clash created great tension related to race and class in a critical period in the country's history, a century of wars and ethnic cleansing made a continuous and very rapid change between the social classes in Iraq. However, there has always been a hierarchy comparable to a structural and ingrained stratification structure that places the Marsh Arabs at the bottom of the Mesopotamian peoples. Recently, the lowest of the poor may have been folks we did not know, and no one shined the light of the flags on them; they are not Marsh Arabs, and we do not know the history of their migration. And their tragedies, like the lady we see on the streets pulling a donkey to gather and sell plastic rubbish, there are hundreds of thousands like her; she may be a black woman or a Bedouin. However, there is a foundation for the establishment of this class, which has grown through time, the same foundation that was established in the conditions under which he lived The Ahwaris in different towns, being the first to suffer from this movement.

With the growth of resistance to the Baath-led rebellion in 1963 within the city, Al-Thawra rapidly became a bastion of the Iraqi Communist Party. Constantinos Apostolo Doxiadis, a Greek architect who previously developed Islamabad and Riyadh, designed the complex. Ironically, considering that Doxiadis' design was regarded as "anti-communist" in order to improve the environment of the village in order to enable the settlement of rural immigrants, architect Louay Al-Ali labels the city's design as a "demographic crime" in an article for Raseef22, adding: "It's like a vast jail designed to control the inhabitants." The dwellings are laid out in the shape of overlapping squares, with little regard for ventilation and lighting regulations, as well as future growth. I'm not sure if the goal is political, but it has allowed successive governments to tighten their grip on the city and give it flexibility in security control and the pursuit of wanted persons. The city is designed in accordance with the so-called science of human settlements, a term used to describe cities that are not allowed to grow naturally.

In the 2019 research paper "Unplanned Urban: How Violence, Walls, and Segregation Have Destroyed Baghdad's Urban Fabric," Izadi, Michael M. R.  The map on the left shows the demographic presence of the city in 2005, the mixed neighborhoods, then the region, in yellow, and the map on the right shows what it looked like in 2007, after two terrible years of Sunni killing Shi'a: bombings (shown with red dots), death squads, militias, forced evictions, and deaths effectively clearing neighborhoods, to be predominantly Shi'a (blue) or mostly Sunni (red).

Northern Basra's crisis: tribal disputes, inequality, and environmental violence

It is commonly recognized and acknowledged that crime and illicit trades thrive in poor neighborhoods. However, there is another aspect in Iraq. For the longest period, Ahwari migration to the south and east of Basra was caused by confrontations, environmental difficulties, and forced replacement. many individuals migrated in search of a secure life and a career. Some of these tribal groups used illicit ways to gain resources, such as tribal warfare over land and water, and the underground economy. Tribal vengeance is a huge problem in and of itself. This has increased security issues and raised urban inhabitants' rejection of a group that is fundamentally unconstitutional and unwelcome. It is crucial to highlight, however, that the use of such methods (by the Ahwari people) has a long history of military warfare and political issues. Historically, tribes were more heavily armed than the military. The Ottoman Empire and the British Empire took advantage of this by arming certain tribes and declaring them as allies to fight with them in WWI. King Faisal (King of Iraq) even claimed that the army only had 1500 weapons, whereas the tribes were equipped and backed. The Sheiks (tribal chiefs) were granted complete control of the land in order to test a semi-feudal system in Balochistan under British supervision. However, the army was later strengthened and transformed into a force capable of quelling tribal and peoples' rebellions, and successive governments continued to use the same system, separating the tribes from the rest of the population to be ruled by the tribe rather than the law of the city, and supporting the sheikhs and confirming their role and authority in the constitution. In a statement titled "National Development (2018-2022)," the federal administration acknowledged in Baghdad that Iraq had entered a "double negative association" between the environment and military conflicts, while other experts warned of a future civil war. For the first time, beginning in 2020, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which monitors and tracks the growth of local displacement in Iraq due to armed conflicts, began producing digital matrices and independent migration reports on displacement based on climate change and water scarcity, particularly in central and southern Iraq. As confirmed in 2019, 21,314 persons were displaced, largely from Al-Ahwar, and the organization polled 802 local residents and migrants in the southern city of Basra to identify the key challenges impeding migrants' capacity to adapt to already unstable urban surroundings. According to the study, "in response to the manifestations of informal urbanization caused by climate change and inequality in Basra, Iraq, migrants tend to congregate in neighborhoods with multiple social problems related to economic security, safety, access to rights, and the relocation of many of them." More than half of migrant households say they can't afford food or other basic requirements, and 53% don't have access to a financial safety net. Migrants also frequently claim being denied access to public services and other rights, such as jobs, police employment, official dispute resolution, and property rights guarantees. In early 2022, the Basra government issued legislation prohibiting the issuance of housing cards to immigrants, the vast majority of whom are Ahwar citizens.

Migration is currently on the rise as a result of the Ahwar's near-complete and severe drought. According to Dr. Jassim al-Asadi, a marshlands environment consultant at Nature Iraq, the salinity rate in different parts of Al-Ahwar has reached 12,600 per million, a "dangerous level of murderous pollution as a result of drought," which has resulted in "recording a large migration of local people in the central Ahwar, and the buffalo is now vulnerable to extinction." In an emergency report, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) and the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) suggest naming those struggling who insist on staying on their lands that are exposed to water scarcity and the effects of climate change in three governorates (Basra, Maysan, and Dhi Qar) with (Stayees), which can mean (steadfast) more than (residents), this is an indication that the problem is exacerbating and threatening the unity of families, as there are entire families that have disintegrated and divided between displaced people and (Stayees). It may be useful for the government to have this crisis, to use it as an excuse for the housing crisis and security deterioration, to evacuate nearby areas for oil contracts, to conserve water for the upper regions, and to ensure low-paid labor for immigrants, and even in political alliances through parties with tribes, tribal mobilization in elections, and tribal loyalty. For religious and political leaders, it is a phenomenon employed by political parties to win over tribes. According to a recent poll done in Basra Governorate by the International Organization for Migration, 65 % feel that tribal conflicts are the governorate's most serious social issue; at the same time, 43% of local inhabitants and IDPs, respectively, trusted tribes as safety nets, compared to 25% of locals and 10% of IDPs who trusted provincial courts. Furthermore, 62% of people and responders who had been locally displaced from other southern governorates expressed "good confidence" in tribal leaders, which outnumbers all other authorities.

According to ACLED, tribal violence in Iraq has grown to more than quadrupled from 2019 to 2020, and the number of such incidents grew by 70% from 2020 to 2021. In 2020, the three southern governorates of Basra, Dhi Qar, and Maysan accounted for 46% of all incidences of tribal violence in the country, and the three governorates' share climbed to 55% the following year. Tribal conflict deaths in the three governorates accounted for around 30% of all tribal conflict deaths in 2021. If there is anything to be said about this crisis, it is that the migration of the Al-Ahwar continues, a source of suffering that has not dried up for a century, with generations and millions of people living this never-ending cycle of poverty, displacement, militarization, and inhuman conditions, and drawing the shape and social and political relations of the country, the solution lies in building a not-disjointed identity, real representation, and organization in order to radicalize the country and change the way the state deals with the cause of these people and the exploitation of their land and rights.