War Remains

After a long day of fishing, an Ahwari family lit a fire to grill their freshly caught fish on the shores of the marsh. As the firewood crackled and the fish blistered slowly to gold, they suddenly discovered that beneath the flames they’d been fanning so eagerly sat a rocket from a past war. Encountering military remains in the marshes through a simple act of everyday life is neither surprising nor uncommon. Decades of occupation, invasion, and state violence, inflicted by British, US, Iranian, and Iraqi militaries, have left rockets, projectiles, and unexploded munitions embedded across the marshes. But long after the wars are declared over, they continue to threaten and shape life. Some lie buried in the mud underwater, invisible from above. Others are caught between dense reeds or rest exposed on dry, cracking ground, becoming increasingly volatile as temperatures rise and metals corrode. A cooking fire on top of a rocket. Children collecting metal from an abandoned tank. A grazing buffalo stepping on a mine. A boat punctured by barbed wire crossing waters it has crossed many times.

Ever since the discovery of oil beneath and around the marshes, the geography was rendered a military target. It was mapped, extracted, claimed, and fought over by colonial, imperial, and regional powers. It was no longer read as land, water, and reeds, but as oil reserves and vulnerable sites for national security. One of these discoveries was the Majnoon oil field in southern Al-Hawizeh Marsh found in 1975—among the largest oil fields in the world. The name, Arabic for “crazy,” was attributed to the extraordinary concentration of oil within a relatively small area. Within a decade, the field known for its abundance had become a major military target of the Iran-Iraq War and the site of the Battle of the Marshes, which Iran called Operation Kheibar. Although the Iraqi military attempted to drain the marsh to its advantage, as it had done in other marshes, Al-Hawizeh Marsh was a distinctly different case. About one third of it lies beyond Iraqi control, extending into Iranian territory, where it goes by another name: Al-Azim Marsh. The Iranian army saw an opportunity to penetrate the border and navigate the wetland terrain that was inaccessible to Iraqi armor. Iranian soldiers moved through the reeds in aluminum boats, building pontoon bridges, barriers, and firing positions across the water. They eventually managed to capture the Majnoon Islands in southern Al-Hawizeh Marsh. In response, the Iraqi military filled the waters of the marsh with barbed wires.

As Saddam’s regime did not have complete power or access to the marsh, it resorted to other methods, traces of which remain present today. To reclaim the Majnoon field, the Iraqi regime built earthen mounds and embankments across the marsh to allow troops and machinery to advance towards the oil field without sinking into the mud. The oil field was not simply fought over; the marsh was reshaped to reclaim it. That reshaping required not only the land, but also the Ahwari people. The same Ahwari communities pushed today into labor in oil fields were a generation earlier pushed into the war itself, driven from their land and conscripted into the military that occupied it. By the time the war was over, the marsh was effectively transformed from merely a battleground into a military infrastructure. A few years later, as a response to the 1991 uprising, the remaining waters were electrified and contaminated, rendering much of them unlivable. Infrastructure and lands may change hands, but the logic persists. The same mounds, embankments, and roads that once carried troops towards the captured oil field today carry tanker trucks of oil out of the area.

Everything else either remained sunk beneath the water or slowly resurfaced. What the drainage and drought exposed blended into everyday life, until it found a new purpose. The tank that had served as Mustafa’s childhood playground suddenly disappeared. The materials became part of an informal economy. Military remains are cut and sold. And while the metal’s exchange value moves through a wider commercial network, those undertaking the work absorb the risks and labor of demilitarization.

In the name of protecting people from the dangers of the military remains, Al-Hawizeh Marsh is increasingly made inaccessible by local authorities. Oil fields are contracted out, markers installed, and munitions gathered and detonated in place, releasing toxins into the air. Elsewhere, the landscape remains perpetually at war, as unexploded ordnance waits to be triggered. Here, contamination seeps not only from the flows of extraction and gas flares, but also from what successive wars have left embedded in the ground, water, and air.

One of the dominant narratives told about the marshes is one of purity. Historically, they have been depicted as “virgin” or untouched. The myth of purity followed Al-Hawizeh Marsh into the UNESCO World Heritage listing in 2016 and the Ramsar convention designation, dismissing the history of militarization, oil extraction, and those who found themselves lighting a fire over a rocket, climbing onto abandoned tanks, or crossing waters filled with barbed wire. It did not deter the oil companies, nor did it clear any of the military remains. The designations seem to mark an endpoint rather than the start of protection.