Introduction

It was not easy for the police to catch the wanted. They had disappeared into the Marshes and from there they staged attacks against the state. In the end, they detained a man, looking like a shepherd and after hours of interrogation they were almost convinced that he has no connection to the insurgents and wanted to let him do. One of the police officers wanted to do a last check and raised the Dishdasha of the shepherd – and see: the legs of the alleged shepherd were white – obviously he had never worked in the marshes before. It turned out that he is one of the five wanted communist activists from urban areas that had come up with the plan to stage an armed resistance against the central state from the Ahwar. After having caught one of them, the others would continue with an armed resistance, managing to bring down an army helicopter before finally getting killed. 1

The martyr was the communist activist Khaled Ahmad Zaki from Baghdad and his companions who had staged in 1968 an armed uprising in the region of Hor-Ghamuka  against the central state. Zaki was convinced that the communist party had to be reborn by the “power of the arms” in the Iraqi countryside – away from what he called “the opportunism of the cities”. Zaki, born in 1935 in Baghdad who studied in London engineering had been very active in the Iraqi Students Association movement. He opted for armed resistance by a people´s movement, rather than the army of a (capitalist) state in which he saw no emancipatory power. Political scientist Philip Winkler explains that this revolutionary approach had two reasons: “not only as a different strategy regarding the question of how to conquer political power, but also as a way out of the excessive factionalism and inner turmoil that had marred the party, and to re-unite the movement behind a new goal”. They envisioned that – following the example of Che Guevara, their movement would spread amongst the poor masses and spread all over Iraq. However, Zaki also had the idea that the current regime in Iraq was selling out its oil resources to the imperialist powers like the USA. In the literature on the social conditions and resistance movements in the Ahwar, it is often framed as being an obvious geography for mobilizing for a revolution due to “its poor inhabitants” – and the need to be organized and mobilized from outside- this does not only misconstrue the richness of the marshes, but also conceals the history of resistance against central and colonial powers by the people of the Ahwar themselves: “For much of the recorded history, the Iraqi marshes served as a “nonstate space” where centralized polities had difficulty establishing authority due to geographic obstacles”, emphasizes the environmental historian Faisal Hussain.2

Extractivism and the production of the evil

Since hundreds of years, during Ottoman times, British colonialism in Iraq and throughout the different political regimes governing Iraq in the 20^th century, there were attempts to “regulate” – not only politically- but also economically the rich resources of the Ahwar region. Therefore, it is worth thinking about the relation between Iraq´s cities, its rulers, and the Marshes as an extractivist relation. Doing so, will help in a next step to better understand the Marshes as an “environment of resistance” to extractivism. To use a comprehensive definition here, extracitivism means activities which remove large quantities of natural resources which the local community has no benefit from. It is a mode of accumulation which is characterized by the demands of the metropolitan centers of capitalism. It is not only present in oil production, but also farming3  or labor migration. The relation of the Marshes to the central state of Iraq and to Baghdad specifically, will be considered as extractivist in this article. 

Although often framed as poor in order to justify environmental and human control, the area is very rich of natural resources and it is mainly the social and environmental engineering, especially of the 20^th century that has rendered the area poor by making people´s lifestyle in the Marshes impossible to sustain. 

During Ottoman times, tribes resisting the power of the central state, had an enormous wealth surplus that enabled its inhabitants to even obtain luxury items from communities outside of the Marshes, such as coffee and tobacco. It is even reported that after the Ottoman state had put a siege on the Marshes to crush the local tribes resistance there, one of them offered Baghdad 70,000 sheep and 700 water buffalo. The marshes around this time even became Baghdad´s main rice supplier (Husain 2014).

Historically, the wetlands in many societies of the world have been portrayed negatively. Apparently from the perspective of city people, it is this dark place and “a refuge for bandits” (Husain 2014) as the renowned Ottoman author Kâtip Çelebï talking about the marshes of the Middle Euphrates in the middle of the 18^th century frames it. Abd Al-Rahman Al-Suwaidi, a city dweller and reporter at that time, was shocked by the ability of the inhabitants of the Marshes to be able to hide and escape state power “in the bellies of the marshes”. He even describes the Ahwar as “dens of sleaze where some tribes lived in order to practice incest” (Husain 2014). The Ottoman official Murtaza Nazmizade considers the tribes living in the Marshes as “evil-doing” because they refuse to pay taxes to the central state (Husain 2014).

Extractivism and its entanglements with development and counterinsurgency

The Ahwar region´s resources have been extracted in different manners in the past. 

In medieval period, during Sasanian times, a complex irrigation system, ensured the economic fortunes of states and grain farmers. After its decline, powers controlling the area, had trouble to utilize the water resources in this way. However, rather than being uncontrolled, this area became a “nonstate spaces” –controlled by actors that were “embedded in the Euphrates ecosystem, composed of the river and its floodplain” and “where centralized polities had difficulty establishing authority due to geographic obstacles” as  the environmental historian Husain Faisal argues (Husain 2014, p. 639). 

Already during Ottoman times, the Euphrates ecosystem allowed the foundation of independent power systems in the Marshes which had changing relations with the central state, at times challenging it and therefore being punished with drainage of the Marshes and at times providing food for the proximate urban centers, participating in their flourishing. 

With the end of the First World War, the British colonial powers intervened in the area in different ways, opening a trajectory that has its effects until today: In 1920, the British used its aircraft to suppress an uprising in the mid-Euphrates, by bombing villages and by air policing preventing attacks on its hydrological infrastructure such as dams4 . In 1950, they recommended the Iraqi monarchy the drainage of the Marshes in order “to improve agricultural irrigation and recover more arable land”5 . Furthermore, during their colonial rule, they empowered rural tribal Sheikhs as feudal lords to weaken the power of the urban centers. This ultimately caused a pauperization of huge parts of the Southern farmers population especially in the areas of the Ahwar. Thousands of people migrated to Baghdad, often with their animals, living in poor self-constructed housing and forming a new urban and exploited underclass6  transforming Iraqi history from their new position: “throughout the past eight decades, [they have] collectively organized local and mass political movements whose demands led to better wages, urban planning, and housing projects”. 7

A corner stone of the “modern” development of the agricultural sector was the forceful moving of rural populations from the hinterlands to more controllable areas. Political scientist Ariel Ahram shows how during the Iran-Iraq war, and as early as 1983 through the euphemistically called “Operation Peace”, counterinsurgency and developmental policies merged: “Concerned about infiltration and insurgency, the regime used techniques that had emerged in the development domain to divert water and forcibly resettle populations from the marshes. These measures were linked practically and discursively to the wider initiative of modernization. The perceived Shi´a betrayal of March 1991 further radicalized this agenda, as the regime set out to "solve" the problems of development and security simultaneously through wholesale destruction and population” (Ahram 2015). After crushing the uprising of March 1991, the villages were burnt, the population was deported, arrested, and public executions were taking place (Ahram 2015). However, more blunt economic reasons also played a role: the access to oil became the decisive factor whether communities were left intact or their land grabbed and drained for extraction (Ahram 2015). By 1993, 90 % of the marshes had disappeared.

The government also introduced a new pattern of capitalist mode of life: “`based on production and direct trade with the government´ by leasing land, launching industrial dairies and marketing centers, and operating veterinary clinics in the area” (Ahram 2015). 

Between 2018 and 2021 around 19,000 have been displaced due to the drought conditions8 . Many of them either leave for the huge city centers or become reliant on – if they are granted – jobs in the oil industry. Instead of having a self-reliant selfsustained lifestyle, they are forced to sell their labor power to survive and become object to the logic of capitalist extraction. 

Human rights advocate Cara Priestley adds another layer to the discussion on extractivism which is “green grabbing”, by which she means the projects that are executed in partnership between conservation NGOs and international oil companies on marsh restoration projects such as “Mesopotamia Marshland National Park” (Priestley 2021). While framed as “concrete step toward national rebuilding and the safeguarding of resources for the future”9  in the words of the Iraqi-American engineer Dr. Azzam Alwash, Cara Priestley argues that this part of the “interaction […] between soft practices of counterinsurgency and neoliberal conservation [of oil companies]” (Priestley 2021). While the continuous hunting and fishing- hence the very way of life of the local population- is framed as disturbing the restoration process of the Marshes, “[t[he founder of Green Iraq, Zaid Kubra, integrated oil extraction within the National Park project, advocating for slant drilling in the marshes and consulting for representatives at Shell, Conoco-Phillips, and Exxon-Mobil” (Priestley 2021).

Uprooting as result of extractivism

The repeated “socioecological uprooting”10  – detaching people from their natural resources- is a result of extractivism. It does not only cause mutigenerational trauma11 , but also has deep gendered implications: it is women that transmit the knowledge and skills to the next generations, their cultural memory gets lost 12 if it cannot be practiced anymore, knowledge loss makes return an impossible endeavor13  relationships and networks are destroyed. This falls together with what Damien Short and Martin Crook have called “ecologically induced genocide” (see Priestley 2021). 

Environments of resistance and suppression

The brutal history of making the Ahwar docile, should not conceal the histories of resistance. Probably with some romanticism, some authors construct it as “the center of revolutionary activity” (Winkler 2020), e.g. referring as far back as to the black slave rebellion of the Zanj and the uprising of the Qaramita in the ninth and tenth centuries (Abdullah 2014). The problem with the construction of this myth is that it relies on the imagination of the Ahwar as a poor and oppressed area, not giving enough space to the stories that retell how the marshes have challenged governments and the central state throughout contemporary history. However, the history of resistance in the Ahwar has been used by authors also to link the history of the communist guerrilla in Northern Iraq since the early 70s and the resistance against the Iraqi state in the Ahwar (i.e Haifa Zangana in her book on her political activities “City of Windows” (Winkler 2020)). Learning, preserving and remembering these rebellious histories of the Ahwar is an important contrapuntal reading to the trajectory of extractivism in Iraq – meaning the importance of gaining an understanding of what is involved when today oil is extracted from the soil of the Marshes and exported and what this implicates for the local communities. 

• 1This account is told according to the testimony of one of the military officers involved, see https://www.ahewar.org/debat/show.art.asp?aid=444737&r=0.
• 2Husain, Faisal (2014): In the Bellies of the Marshes: Water and Power in the Countryside of Ottoman Baghdad. In Environmental History 19 (4), p. 639.
• 3https://www.tni.org/files/download/beyonddevelopment_extractivism.pdf
• 4Ahram, Ariel I. (2015): DEVELOPMENT, COUNTERINSURGENCY, AND THE DESTRUCTION OF THE IRAQI MARSHES. In Int. J. Middle East Stud. 47 (3), pp. 447–466.
• 5Ahram, Ariel I. (2015): DEVELOPMENT, COUNTERINSURGENCY, AND THE DESTRUCTION OF THE IRAQI MARSHES. In Int. J. Middle East Stud. 47 (3), pp. 447–466. Available online at http://www.jstor.org/stable/43997992.
• 6Gupta, Huma (2021): The Birth of Sadr City and Popular Protest in Iraq. In Middle East Brief September (144), p. 1.
• 7Gupta, Huma (2021): The Birth of Sadr City and Popular Protest in Iraq. In Middle East Brief September (144), p. 1.
• 8Ahwar Collective (2022): Climate-induced displacement flows in cntral and southern Iraq. Available online at https://www.instagram.com/p/CdO6qXqKp3e/.
• 9https://www.circleofblue.org/2013/world/iraqs-first-national-park-a-sto…
• 10See Mona Dejani in Jadaliyya Reports (2020): A Environmental Justice in the Middle East: Activism, Resistance, and Decolonisation (Video). Available online at https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/42157.
• 11Ahwar Collective (2022): What are the things that became illegal for the Marsh Arabs after the genocide campaign? And what are the problems that Marsh Arabs are facing Now? Available online at https://www.instagram.com/p/Ccm4dOPujcg/.
• 12Al-mudaffar fawzi, Nadia; Goodwin, Kelly P.; Mahdi, Bayan A.; Stevens, Michelle L. (2016): Effects of mesopotamian marsh (iraq) desiccation on the cultural knowledge and livelihood of marsh arab women. In Ecosyst Health Sustain 2 (3), Article e01207. DOI: 10.1002/ehs2.1207.
• 13Al-mudaffar fawzi, Nadia; Goodwin, Kelly P.; Mahdi, Bayan A.; Stevens, Michelle L. (2016): Effects of mesopotamian marsh (iraq) desiccation on the cultural knowledge and livelihood of marsh arab women. In Ecosyst Health Sustain 2 (3), Article e01207. DOI: 10.1002/ehs2.1207.

Publication bibliography

Abdullah, Thabit (2014): A Short History of Iraq. 2nd ed. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. Available online at https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kxp/detail.action?docID=1688944.

Ahram, Ariel I. (2015): DEVELOPMENT, COUNTERINSURGENCY, AND THE DESTRUCTION OF THE IRAQI MARSHES. In Int. J. Middle East Stud. 47 (3), pp. 447–466. Available online at http://www.jstor.org/stable/43997992.

Husain, Faisal (2014): In the Bellies of the Marshes: Water and Power in the Countryside of Ottoman Baghdad. In Environmental History 19 (4), pp. 638–664.

Priestley, Cara (2021): “We Won’t Survive in a City. The Marshes are Our Life”: An Analysis of Ecologically Induced Genocide in the Iraqi Marshes. In Journal of Genocide Research 23 (2), pp. 279–301.

Winkler, Philipp (2020): 11 The ‘Che Guevara of the Middle East’: Remembering Khalid Ahmad Zaki’s Revolutionary Struggle in Iraq’s Southern Marshes. In Laure Guirguis (Ed.): The Arab lefts. Histories and legacies, 1950s-1970s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 207–221.