{"id":24846,"date":"2023-02-05T10:14:34","date_gmt":"2023-02-05T08:14:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/?p=24846"},"modified":"2023-02-17T18:24:49","modified_gmt":"2023-02-17T16:24:49","slug":"dispossessed-by-climate-iraqi-refugees-in-their-own-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/dispossessed-by-climate-iraqi-refugees-in-their-own-country\/","title":{"rendered":"Dispossessed by Climate\u2014Iraqi Refugees in Their Own Country"},"content":{"rendered":"

In October 2021, I embarked on a journey from Iraq\u2019s southernmost point, travelling with fixer Essam Al-Sudani and a translator, from the fishing community of Al-Faw at the Shatt Al-Arab estuary on the Persian Gulf up to the Iranian border in Kurdistan in the country\u2019s north, exploring the impact of climate change and water scarcity along the way on those most directly affected. It was a route of despair, as people abandoned desiccated farms for lives on the edges of unwelcoming cities in Iraq \u2013 or beyond. It was a route of anger and suppurating rage \u2013 at Turkey and Iran, whose dams finished off the few farms climate change had not yet entirely defeated, and at a government unable to force the two countries to open the taps. It was a route of crisis, with Iraq expected to run out of useable water by 2025. In 2022, I returned to Iraq, this time to see what the new city lives the climate displaced farmers looked like.\u00a0 (This project was made possible with the support of the Pulitzer Center<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n

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Susan Schulman<\/h4>\n

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\u201cIt was a beautiful life \u2013 like heaven. We owned the land, and it was a very rich land. We took care of our families and were very wealthy. I was\u00a0like a king. Anything I wanted, anything we needed, it was there at our fingertips,\u201d recalls Ali Sahib Hussein, 42, in an interview with The Markaz Review. He was speaking of the life his family lived for generations, farming their ancestral land in Al-Abbasiyyah, near the banks of the Euphrates in Iraq\u2019s Al-Diwaniyyah governorate.<\/p>\n

That was before the temperatures soared and the rainfall all but ceased; before water scarcity became so acute that snakes invaded homes in their own desperate search for water; before Iraq\u2019s rivers fell to unprecedented levels, lakes dried up, crops shriveled, and the land turned to desert, forcing legions of farmers to abandon their beloved farms to seek new ways of making a living in the cities.<\/p>\n

Now, Hussein spends his days sandwiched among tombs, selling incense and jugs of hot-pink holy water in the Wadi Al-Salam cemetery \u2014 the world\u2019s largest \u2014 in Najaf. \u201cI was on the green land \u2014 my land, my trees. Now, as you can see, I am only among the dead,\u201d he says, sighing heavily.<\/p>\n

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