Although Hussein's government built dams along the Tigris and Euphrates in the 1970s, and paved roads through the wetlands in the 1980s to move supplies to the front lines during the eight-year war with Iran, the marshlands remained largely intact. In 1990, an estimated 300,000 people lived there.
Everything changed after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when Shiite Muslims in the south rose up against Hussein's government. Some Shiite leaders, particularly those who sneaked into the country from Iran, hid in the marshes, which were out of the reach of Hussein's tanks and artillery. The Shiite leaders were welcomed -- and aided -- by the Shiite Marsh Arabs.
Three women return from a morning spent collecting reeds from the marshes in Zayad, Iraq. The reeds are a common item used to build homes, make mats and other household items.
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Even after Hussein's army quashed the revolt by slaughtering thousands of Shiites and attacking their villages, the president was bent on retribution. He ordered the marshes drained.
To subvert nature, he approved the construction of a massive network of canals, pipelines and dams. State-owned businesses and private firms were required to dispatch all their bulldozers to work on the projects. Sunnis from Hussein's strongholds in central Iraq, including Tikrit and Fallujah, were encouraged to travel south to help dig.
The engineering feat was enormous -- and remarkably successful. The Euphrates, which spilled entirely into the southern half of the marshes, was diverted into a wide new canal called the Mother of All Battles River that stretched more than 100 miles around the former wetlands. Farther upstream, billions of gallons of Euphrates water was redirected in another canal and dumped into a depression in the desert.
The same strategy was employed on the Tigris River, parching the northern and eastern sections of the marshes.
Before Hussein's drainage project, Iraq's marshes were the Middle East's largest wetland, covering about 7,500 square miles. By the late 1990s, satellite images indicated that less than 10 percent of Iraq's marshland had any water. What remained was miles of parched, salty earth covered with clumps of scrub brush.
With no way to fish or farm, no reeds or birds, legions of Marsh Arabs had no choice but to leave the only place they considered home. Tens of thousands fled as refugees to Iran. By 1993, the United Nations estimated there were only 50,000 marsh dwellers left, and their numbers continued to dwindle over the following years.
In Zayad, the water level dropped as if someone had pulled a plug, residents said. Soon there was only mud. The reeds died. The birds flew away. The water buffalo had no place to roam.
Unlike their neighbors, the people of Zayad opted to stick it out instead of moving. Hunger was rampant. Some were forced to sell their possessions for food. Reed homes fell into disrepair because there were no building materials. Instead, the villagers built mud-brick huts.
"We went from having everything to having nothing," Kerkush said. "Our land turned to desert. How can anyone live in the desert?"
Redirecting the River
In mid-April, a few days after Hussein's government fell, Ali Shaheen returned to his job as director of the Irrigation Department in Nasiriyah. Located about 25 miles northwest of Zayad, Nasiriyah was the scene of some of the heaviest fighting during the war. But with the hostilities over and Shiites firmly in control of the local government, he decided to try to reverse the damage Hussein had wrought.
With a U.S. military escort, he drove to Garmat Bani Hassan, a town a mile away from Zayad. There, he ordered creaky metal gates on the Euphrates to be cranked open for the first time since 1991.
Shaheen, a short, balding civil engineer with a stubble-covered face, did the same thing with two other gates before embarking on a bigger engineering challenge -- redirecting the Euphrates. He requisitioned several Irrigation Department bulldozers and smashed the dam Hussein had constructed to divert water to the Mother of All Battles River. For good measure, he had Hussein's river blocked off with a mountain of dirt.
