The Mesopotamian Marshes, the Ahwar, are the wetlands of southern Iraq where the Tigris and the Euphrates come together, and they did not dry out through neglect. They were engineered away. A system of canals and embankments was cut to carry both rivers past the wetlands and out to the Gulf, and the Central Marshes lost two thirds of their water within about two years. In 2003 the people who had been dried out came back and cut the dykes open by hand. The water spread again, the reeds rose, and the fish and the birds followed. What came back is the largest wetland in the Middle East and the last home of the Ma'dan, who live on it rather than beside it.
The way in is a mashoof, a long shallow canoe that your boatman drives with a pole rather than a paddle, because the channels are too narrow for anything else. Reeds rise well above the boat and close behind you, so the marsh arrives in pieces: a heron lifting off, a buffalo track cut through the wall of green, then open water. The islands out there are made, not found — layers of reed and silt piled into rafts strong enough to carry a hut, a family and several water buffalo, and rebuilt as the bottom layers rot away. Step onto one and the ground gives slightly under your weight. Water buffalo are the currency here. They are milked for thick cream, swim between islands to graze, and are fed cut reed by hand when the water turns too salty for green shoots. With the engine off the reedbeds are loud; the Basra reed warbler nests in these cattail beds and almost nowhere else, so when the reeds dry it has no second home. And in Chibayish you are received in a mudhif, a hall of bundled reed columns bent into arches and lashed together, with no nails and no timber in it. It is the same design Sumerian carvers cut into stone five thousand years ago.