Alwash, 52, a citizen of Iraq and the United States, is a hydraulic
engineer and the director of Nature Iraq, the country's first and only
environmental organization. He founded the organization in 2004 together
with his wife Suzanne, an American geologist, with financial support
from the United States, Canada, Japan and Italy. His goal is to save a
largely dried-up marsh in southern Iraq. In return for giving up his job
in California, Alwash is now putting his safety and health at risk.
Free Internet Press :: Iraq's Garden Of Eden - Restoring The Paradise That Saddam Destr... - 0 views
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Only 20 years ago, an amazing aquatic world thrived in the area, which is in the middle of the desert. Larger than the Everglades, it extended across the southern end of Iraq, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers divide into hundreds of channels before they come together again near Basra and flow into the Persian Gulf. For environmentalists, this marshland was a unique oasis of life, until the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, had it drained in the early 1990s after a Shiite uprising.
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Within a few years, the marshland had shrunk to less than 10 percent of its original size. In a place that was once teeming with wildlife - wild boar, hyenas, foxes, otters, water snakes and even lions - the former reed beds had been turned into barren salt flats, poisoned and full of land mines. In a 2001 report, the United Nations characterized the destruction of the marshes as one of the world's greatest environmental disasters.
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