Originally published at Alhurra by Delshad Hussein
Sawsan, not her real name, a young woman from Iraq’s Maysan province, never imagined that a water shortage could lead to her father’s death and completely alter the course of her life.
Her father had no part in the dispute that erupted in their village. He was merely in the street when a stray bullet struck him, killing him on the spot.
The fight had broken out among neighbors over irrigation water.
“We left the village for Amarah, the provincial capital,” she told Alhurra. With water-related disputes escalating in southern Iraq’s rural areas, life there has become a dangerous gamble.
Sawsan’s story, though personal, is a tragic reflection of a recurring reality in southern Iraq, where violence spikes every summer as water scarcity intensifies.
For more than five years, Iraq has been gripped by a devastating drought.
As the effects of climate change worsen, water is no longer just a scarce natural resource it has become fuel for bloody tribal conflicts that threaten social stability and force thousands of families to flee their villages into the unknown.
Environmental activist Mortada al-Janoubi has lived near these conflicts for years and has witnessed how drought, combined with the erosion of agriculture, fishing, and livestock livelihoods, has deepened the suffering of the Marsh Arabs.
Until the summer of 2021, al-Janoubi, a resident of the Amarah marshes, was a fisherman, a trade passed down through generations in his family. But he lost this livelihood due to the drying of the marshes caused by reduced water levels in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and declining rainfall.
He became an environmental activist to shed light on the plight of the marshes and their people.
Alhurra conducted a multi-day investigation into tribal water conflicts in southern Iraq, one of the most pressing human impacts of climate change on local communities.
According to security forces in Maysan, at least seven people have been killed in armed disputes over irrigation water in the province’s villages since the beginning of this year alone.
These conflicts often drag on for days and only end with government intervention.
Al-Janoubi explains that the water allocations reaching Amarah are insufficient, as they come from Tigris tributaries. Villages along the way often build earthen dams to retain as much water as possible, causing water levels to drastically drop by the time it reaches more distant villages.
This fuels violent disputes over water shares between villages and tribes.
“Ponds and lakes are forming along riverbanks, increasing adjacent farmland. Those closer to the river consume more water than those farther away, which creates tensions between neighboring villages,” al-Janoubi told Alhurra.
These disputes have now extended beyond villages. Southern provinces are accusing each other of taking more than their fair share of water.
When security forces intervene to remove illegal water structures, clashes sometimes erupt with violators.
The Iraqi Ministry of Water Resources, in cooperation with security forces, continues to dismantle unauthorized dams and ponds built by farmers along riverbanks, particularly in northern Basra and in Maysan and Dhi Qar provinces.
Urban Exodus
Sawsan was forced to quit school after relocating to Amarah.
She now works at a women’s tailor shop to support her family, a sick mother and younger sisters.
According to al-Janoubi, migration from villages and rural areas in southern Iraq has been ongoing for years.
“Large numbers of families have left their villages and moved to cities like Karbala, Baghdad, and Basra in search of new livelihoods,” he said.
The marshes are wetlands located in the lowlands of southern Iraq, forming a triangle across Maysan, Dhi Qar, and Basra provinces, where each forms a point of the triangle thick with reeds.
The Hammar Marsh is Iraq’s largest, straddling Basra and Dhi Qar. Next is the Hawizeh Marsh near the Iran-Iraq border, and then the Chibayish Marsh in Nasiriyah, the capital of Dhi Qar.
In 2016, UNESCO added the marshes to the World Heritage List as a protected natural area known for rich biodiversity and proximity to ancient Mesopotamian cities like Ur, Eridu, and Uruk among humanity’s earliest civilizations.
But in recent years, the marshes have lost many of their ecological features due to drought.
Reports from the marshes and nearby villages indicate mass deaths of water buffalo and other livestock, large-scale fish die-offs, and a dramatic drop in migratory bird populations that once flocked there year-round.
Marshland farmers have lost their agricultural lands.
Environmental expert Haidar Rashad says the drought-related conflicts in southern Iraq fall into two categories: tribal disputes over water, and clashes between rural migrants and urban residents over job opportunities.
“Rural migrants are competing with city dwellers for work and putting pressure on already strained infrastructure,” he said. Continued migration from the countryside is disrupting demographic balance.
Rashad stresses the need for solutions that resettle rural populations and provide alternatives in their original areas so they don’t have to leave.
Agriculture is Iraq’s most water-intensive sector.
According to Iraq’s Ministry of Environment strategy for 2024–2030, the country uses about 30 billion cubic meters of water annually, with agriculture accounting for 75–80% of that use.
The strategy warns that shrinking water resources will severely affect agriculture, causing many farmers to lose their lands and pushing Iraq to depend heavily on imported crops a major economic loss.
This is not the first time the marshes have dried up.
Over the past four decades, the marshes have dried up three times. The first was in 1985, when the former Iraqi regime drained them during the Iran-Iraq War, turning much of the area into a battlefield.
That war displaced most of the marsh population. But at the time, there were no tribal disputes over water only tensions between displaced rural families and the urban communities they temporarily joined during the war.
The second wave of drainage began in the early 1990s after the Gulf War. The regime launched a massive engineering campaign that created the “Al-Az River,” diverting water from the Bitera, Areed, and Al-Majar rivers, converting much of the marshland around 450,000 dunams into semi-reclaimed land.
The plan involved building earthen dams to block water from reaching the marshes and redirecting it to the Euphrates near Qurna. Other dams were built between Qalat al-Madina and Dhi Qar to prevent Euphrates water from feeding the Hammar Marsh. Additional dams within the marshes accelerated their drying.
After the regime fell in 2003, water returned to parts of the marshes as locals tore down the dams. The Ministry of Water Resources launched projects to revive the marshes aided by unusually heavy rainfall that year.
The third and current drought began in 2021, driven by climate change, which caused rainfall to drop dramatically, temperatures to rise sharply, and desertification to spread across the country.
According to UN data, 2021 was Iraq’s second-driest year in four decades, due to record-low rainfall.
Over the past 40 years, water flows in the Tigris and Euphrates which supply about 98% of Iraq’s surface water have declined by about 40%.
Data obtained by Alhurra from Dhi Qar province shows that nearly 10,000 families have been forced to leave rural areas and move to towns and cities due to worsening drought.
Haidar Saadi, advisor to the Dhi Qar governor for citizen affairs, said outdated irrigation techniques, inconsistent water allocation among farmers, noncompliance with water quotas, and farming outside the government’s plan have all contributed to violent conflicts among farmers, tribes, and villages.
“These disputes place pressure on local government and security forces, which have to intervene quickly to de-escalate, but sometimes things spiral out of control,” Saadi told Alhurra.
He describes water conflicts as a recurring and volatile issue during the summer, occasionally disrupting other public services like government offices and schools when roads are blocked during clashes.
Saadi also warned that abandoned villages could become havens for organized crime groups, using them as launchpads for illegal activities and a threat to public safety.
According to Saadi, one of the most effective ways to reduce water conflicts is to balance irrigation among farmers by shrinking agricultural quotas, encouraging low-water crops, and patrolling the area with security forces to monitor and prevent water violations. Offenders must sign pledges not to repeat the violations.