Prologue

A dark plume appeared on the satellite image on our shared screen. We had been trying to locate an Ahwari village. The image collided with testimonies of the toxic air Ahwari locals inhale, living near Al-Hawizeh Marsh, surrounded by oil wells. With a click-and-drag of the satellite image, an Ahwari local pointed at the source of the plume: a flare stack in an oil field, one kilometer from another village, so close that both fit inside the same frame without having to zoom out. They began to draw a polygon around the oil field. Before they could close it, they were telling us about the moment they first encountered the machinery that paved the ground for it.

We, Farah and Ameneh, started this research as a formal spatial investigation into the oil industry’s environmental violations in Al-Hawizeh Marsh in southern Iraq. Because access to this marsh is heavily restricted, we held online participatory mapping workshops with our collaborators, Ahwari people, whose name comes from ahwar, the Arabic word for marsh. Our aim was to read satellite images and maps of the marsh through the lived experience and situated knowledge of Ahwari people, and to think with them about how remote sensing and mapping could support their claim to the marsh as their homeland. We prepared questions to ask, sites to locate, ecological flows to trace, datasets to corroborate, and assumptions to verify.

But our meetings quickly turned into storytelling sessions. In every workshop, we shifted in our seats: from hunching over a screen split between a satellite image and our workshop plan, to leaning back, head in hand, listening and taking in the weight of a memory or an anecdote about living between a shrinking wetland and encroaching oil fields. Stories emerged every time we zoomed in on an edge of a water body, the shadows of houses, the sharp corners of an oil well, or an embankment cutting across the marsh. They filled the workshop and the map until we could no longer tell what was leading them: our research plans or their stories.

Over a year of workshops, our collaborators kept reminding us that the satellite image we were looking at is already out of date. The shilib rice field is now punctured by an oil well. The water body where Ahwaris used to fish is now a dry riverbed, drained to make way for oil exploration. They also pointed to conditions that existed before the satellite cameras could capture them. A stretch of what is now dry land was once part of Al-Hawizeh Marsh, its water deep enough that, in the 1970s, our Ahwari collaborator’s grandfather paddled his mashhoof from his village to the city of Al-Kahla. Over that water, nothing stopped Ahwari people from crossing the border into Ahwaz in Iran and back.

Between workshops, reports kept arriving. Reed fires in the marsh at the Iraq–Iran border. And one of our Ahwari collaborators was held in custody and sued for his environmental activism.

In the eyes of power, Al-Hawizeh Marsh’s richness lies not in its ecology, biodiversity, or cultural history, but in the oil beneath its soil. This logic has subjected the marsh and its inhabitants to decades of colonial, imperial, and state interventions. Throughout its history, the marsh has been described as an unproductive swamp, a wasteland, or a threat to national security. These narratives made each intervention seem necessary and inevitable. The marsh was aerially photographed and mapped as the first steps before it was dammed, divided, drained, leveled, fought over, punctured, and contaminated to find, extract, and protect its oil.

Mapping and photography, in other words, have long served the marsh’s desiccation. The satellite image is their contemporary form: a view from above, too often accepted as an objective record onto which the logics of extraction can be imposed. We came into this research aware of its distance and abstraction. What we lacked was another way to read it. The stories Ahwari people shared, so often suppressed, erased, or penalized, gave us one. The satellite image became a prompt that opened a story, and the story in turn taught us how to read the image. Some stories added resolution to the image or new data to a map layer. Others corrected what it seemed to show, or carried a single image back and forward in time, beyond its moment of capture.

Marsh Anthology: Between Water and Oil invites you to read the marsh as our collaborators taught us to. Each story begins with a moment, a site, and an Ahwari life confronted by oil extraction, and traces the histories and spatial strategies that shaped that confrontation. Our Ahwari collaborators’ voices lead each story, layered with our writing, satellite images, maps, photographs, videos, documents, and archival material, forming an open spatial archive of the marsh that grows with every new story. Here, every story of injustice is also a story of water.

In the summer of 2025, Ahwari locals began drawing polygons marking the perimeters of each oil well that surrounds their villages. They have not stopped.