Cleaning up the cradle of civilization

I’ve always wanted to see the Tigris River. It’s the eastern member of the two great rivers that define Mesopatamia, the other being the Euphrates. The river flows south from the mountains of southeastern Turkey through Iraq. It has the same problems that plague our rivers - heavily dammed in Iraq and Turkey to provide water for irrigating the arid and semi-desert regions bordering the river valley, reducing the flow of water downstream with negative environmental impacts.  Pollution from toxic dumping and gravel mining hasn’t helped either.

Now, to aid with clean up, the Waterkeeper Alliance has extented it’s program all the way to Iraq. Pete Nichols of the Humboldt Baykeeper was interview by WNC about his recent trip to Iraq to help set up a Riverkeeper program on the upper Tigris with Nature Iraq founder Dr. Azzam Alwash. You can listen HERE .

“I heard an interview with this Iraqi, Azzam Alwash, talking about his [river] restoration work for an organization called Nature Iraq,” Nichols said in the North Coast Journal . “It was this fantastic story of restoring the wetlands that were supposedly the Garden of Eden.”

This area is has a turbulent history. According to the NCJ, after the first Iraq War, Saddam Hussein punished Shiite rebels who lived in the marshlands by diverting the river, taking away their water and their livelihood and causing an environmental disaster in the process. “It was basically an ethnic cleansing,” said Nichols. “He drained the wetlands and turned them into a desert, then he burned [the reeds] to wipe out the rebels who hung out in the extensive marsh systems.”

What does Nature Iraq gain from joining Waterkeeper Alliance? Alwash says it’s about connections.

“Everything in nature is connected,” he said.“When we started working on the restoration of the marshes, we figured out pretty shortly that, in fact, the health of the marshes depends on the water upstream. The water upstream comes from the mountains of Turkey and passes through many, many areas of Iraq and Syria where pollution is introduced into the water, be it the sewage from cities, be it drainage water from irrigated farms, be it from people using the water to wash their cars, and so on.”

Caring for the watershed now involves more than just Iraq. “Inside Iraq we’re trying to create an organization that will take care of each tributary and the marshes,” said Alwash. “That’s just the initial step. Then hopefully we can work with like-minded organizations in Turkey and Syria … that we hope will eventually grow to cover the entire basin of the Tigris and Euphrates.”