Who Enters The Marsh

In April 2024, local authorities suddenly blocked the Ahwari people off from Al-Hawizeh Marsh, one of the last remaining marshes in southern Iraq. Being barred from the marsh, or restricted in their use of it, was nothing new to them, but this was the first time since the fall of the Ba’ath regime in 2003 that the marsh had been physically blockaded. It began with a thin strand of barbed wire across the Om Al-Toos River, a kilometer from where the river meets the marsh. Soon after, a second barrier went up at the entrance to the marsh itself.

For centuries, Ahwari people lived on the waters of the marsh. They built villages of floating reedbeds, surrounded by water on every side. That intimacy with the water was ruptured the moment they were forcibly displaced from it. In modern history, the invention of the Iraqi nation-state and the borders that defined it triggered successive events. From the discovery of oil in the south of Iraq in the 1970s, to the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, to the drainage projects that followed the 1991 uprising, each brought its own wave of forced displacement.

The 2024 blockade was the latest layer of barriers built up since 2003 in the name of securing the border with Iran. Border security became the justification for keeping Ahwari people out. The border guards kept extending their control zone far beyond the customary 500 meters, until it reached 35 kilometers. The marsh’s own soil was excavated to build earthen embankments around it, with a checkpoint every 500 meters. This turned the entire marsh, and the rivers and lands to its west, into a border buffer zone. Ahwari people had gone from waking up every day in dwellings a few steps from the water, to being pushed further and further away, to having to plead their cases and seek permission to be allowed into the marsh as visitors.

The authorities made access, already heavily restricted, conditional on body searches by border police. They knew Ahwari women would not accept this and, without offering an alternative, barred them altogether for a time from the marsh and, in turn, every practice associated with it. Their exclusion disrupted the very fabric of Ahwari society. Those who were still allowed to enter the marsh faced a time limit. Ahwari fishermen traditionally set their nets late at night and stayed in the marsh overnight to collect their catch at dawn. With entry limited to daytime, that way of fishing, and the income that depended on it, was cut off.

The roads that once carried fish and milk from the marsh to the rest of the country now carry oil trucks. Oil has ruled Iraq’s economy for a century. It began under the British Mandate, with the concessions granted in the 1920s. And it deepened under US imperialism, which since the 2003 invasion has reopened the fields to foreign companies and routed the oil revenue through the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In the decades between, from the 1980s until the invasion, wars and sanctions, and the draining of the marshes that came with them, further weakened Iraq’s capacity to feed itself. Today, oil provides an estimated 88 percent of government revenue, part of it used to import food. The oil that pays for the food lies beneath the very marshes that once provided it. Restricted from the marsh, many families were forced to migrate. For those who remained, protest became a means of survival. After the blockade, Ahwari locals gathered again and again opposite the police station, demanding an explanation from the authorities. For weeks they received no answers. Some restrictions were eventually eased under pressure from the protestors, but freedom of access to the marsh did not return. And as they continued to fight for access, oil exploration machinery was making its way into Al-Hawizeh Marsh.

Oil is not new to Al-Hawizeh Marsh. Since the 1970s, oil fields and wells have spread across much of what used to be part of it. But this was the first time exploration had entered the part of the marsh protected under the Ramsar Convention and inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2016. Local Ahwari activists obtained a series of official letters, including one dated March 22, 2025, in which the Ministry of Oil attached a map gridded with seismic survey lines. Along each line it demanded a 10-meter-wide corridor bulldozed through the marsh's soil for drilling rigs, each assigned to punch a hole every 50 meters. The corridors belong to a larger plan for Al-Hawizeh oil field, which extends across the Iran-Iraq border. In 2018, it was awarded to China’s Geo-Jade Petroleum. Oil exploration now stretches across approximately 300 square kilometers, from Fakkah to Musharrah. Already, 11,000 exploration points have claimed the last remaining waters of the marsh for oil. A taxidermied otter, a buffalo skull, and a fishing spear, joined the protests, representing the lives the oil industry threatens along with those of Ahwari people. The location of every protest marked a relation between infrastructure and injustice: they blocked the road used by oil trucks, they protested by the blocked underpass that they used to pass under by boat to enter the marsh, they held sit-ins outside the police station and checkpoints that would not grant them permission to herd their buffalo, fish, or gather reeds, and they surrounded the water regulator that controls how much water their rivers and marsh receive.