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After Saddam, the welcome flood
Times - Martin Fletcher - 18/01/08
It is a scene of stunning natural beauty. The young man steers his wooden boat through a maze of narrow waterways flanked by banks of yellow reeds. The water sparkles beneath a wintry sun. The floats of submerged fishing nets bobble on the surface. Herons and waterfowl scatter as the boats approach. More...
UCLA Magazine - David Geffner, David Miezal - 01/01/08
Exhausted, Marine Cpl. Aaron Mankin stopped rolling in the dirt to put out the fire that had consumed his upper body. He became very still and closed his eyes. Images of family and friends flashed through his mind. "I thought about this girl I was dating," Mankin says quietly, gazing over at his wife, a fellow Marine. "I lay down to die and fixated on her face. More...
Guardian - Stuart Coles - 23/11/07
Saddam Hussein had scant regard for the largest wetlands in the Middle East, which teem with unique wildlife like the smooth-coated otter, Mesopotamian deer and Basra reed warbler. He saw them merely as a haven for hiding rebels and deserters from the Iran-Iraq War, and in the early 1990s, he ordered them to be drained. More...
Humanitarian cutbacks: the scandal in Iraq
New Statesman - Rageh Omaar - 18/09/06
As I sit down to write this article on 11 September 2006, I am less than five minutes' walk from the former Green Line, which divided the city of Jerusalem in half before the Six Day War in 1967. No 1 Road, as it is still called, was the ceasefire line that marked the international border running through Jerusalem between Israel and Jordan which was agreed after the creation of the Jewish state. More...
RelifeWeb - 15/08/06
Following the sudden onset of conflict in Lebanon, a serious humanitarian crisis is rapidly emerging. 1 million people have been displaced; abandoning their homes to escape the violence. Hundreds more have been killed or injured in the fighting. More...
HRH hosts a reception at Clarence House for a charity that supports Marsh Arabs
HRH - 03/03/06
The Prince of Wales has praised the work of a British-based organisation fighting to alleviate the plight of the Marsh Arabs in southern Iraq. The Prince, who is Patron of AMAR International Charitable Foundation hosted a reception at Clarence House for conference delegates who have spent the week debating initiatives to help the Marsh Arabs. More...
UNESCO and AMAR Foundation sign Memorandum of Understanding
UNESCO - 11/12/05
The Director-General of UNESCO, Mr Koïchiro Matsuura, signed today with Baroness Emma Nicholson of Winterbourne, Chairperson of the AMAR International Charitable Foundation and Member of the European Parliament, a Memorandum of Understanding between UNESCO and the AMAR Foundation. More...
Pakistan earthquake team - update
RelifeWeb - 15/11/05
AMAR reacted immediately to the earthquake in South Asia, looking at the best way to use the expertise gained in 20 months of working in Bam, Iran, after the earthquake there. A self-sufficient team with specific experience of the aftermath of the Bam earthquake, including a doctor, a midwife and a sanitary engineer, was put together. AMAR was invited by the Pakistan Ministry of Health to mobilise the team, working in conjunction with the World Health Organistion. More...
RelifeWeb - 20/10/05
The devastating earthquake which struck South Asia on 8 October killed over 40,000 people, injured over 65,000 and left three million people homeless. With temperatures dropping below freezing, the survivors now face a battle against hypothermia, hunger and disease. More...
Harvard Magazine - Christopher Reed - 01/01/05
Five thousand years ago in the Mesopotamian marshes, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in southern Iraq, the Sumerians began history. They devised an irrigation system and built an agrarian society, banding together the children of hunter-gatherers in the world's first cities—Ur, Uruk, Eridu, Lagash, Larsa—on the edge of the marshes. From their cradle of civilization, the Sumerians brought forth writing (as well as the wheel, maybe, and much else fundamental) and carved into clay tablets the epic of Gilgamesh, which describes the Flood. Here, many say, was the Garden of Eden (although the latest scientific thinking suggests it was at a spot now at the bottom of the Persian Gulf). More...
Waters return but the Marsh Arabs are still hungry
Telegraph - Jack Fairweather - 26/06/04
The reeds part gently as a canoe moves through the marshes of southern Iraq. With the crackle of fires as families prepare food on little islands of mud and reed, this seems an idyllic place untouched by terrorism. The scene is all the more pleasing since these marshes were the scene of one of Saddam Hussein's greatest crimes. In the 1990s he had them drained to deprive Shia rebels of a hideout, destroying in the process an eco-system which had barely changed since Biblical times. More...
Providing a brighter future for the children of Iraq
Toy Industries of Europe - 06/04/04
TIE’s donation to the AMAR International Charitable Foundation helps equip schools in the Iraqi Marshlands. TIE has teamed up with prominent Member of the European Parliament and Chairman of the AMAR International Foundation, Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, to provide a brighter future for the children of Iraq. TIE’s donation will help equip primary schools which are currently being rebuilt in the Iraqi Marshlands. More...
As the tide of violence recedes, Marsh Arabs hope for new start
Observer - Patrick Graham - 19/10/03
Haider doesn't know a lot about fishing, he says, and tosses his net out into the water from his narrow boat. His small catch of zuri, just covering the bottom of a Styrofoam crate, won't fetch more than a dollar. Barely enough, he tells us as he punts through the weeds, for his daily cigarettes. His father taught him how to fish 13 years ago, when he was 10, before Saddam drained the marshes, causing one of the world's worst environmental disasters. More...
Project to restore wetlands destroyed by Saddam begins
Independent - Terri Judd - 10/10/03
A project has begun to reverse one of the greatest humanitarian and ecological disasters of recent times, the draining of the wetlands that were home to Iraq's 250,000 Marsh Arabs. Saddam drained the wetlands after the Marsh Arabs, whose world of reed houses, water buffalo and canoes captivated the writer Sir Wilfred Thesiger, supported the Shia revolt in the early Nineties. More...
Duke ecologist finds devastation, hope in Iraqi marshes
Bio-Medicine - Scottee Cantrell - 18/08/03
An expedition by Duke University wetlands expert Curtis Richardson to evaluate damage to Iraq's storied Mesopotamian Marshlands revealed an environmental disaster of vast proportions. However, he also found the potential for restoring a significant portion of the marshes and with them the Marsh Arab culture. More...
Saddam stole our water: Can the arid lands of the Marsh Arabs ever be restored?
Times - Christina Lamb - 27/07/03
'So we were here,' she says, hauling on board her husband, Jaseem, a small man wearing thick bifocals and a dishdash, the long Arabic dress, with a chequered head cloth. 'Then behind us were 40, maybe 50 boats full of people clapping and singing. Come on, children!' Her seven children and an assortment of neighbours start singing and clapping. More...
The Village Voice - Paroma Basu - 20/05/03
Iraq's onetime Garden of Eden, a vast stretch of wetlands in southern Iraq known as the Mesopotamian marshlands, destroyed by the 1991 Gulf War and by Saddam Hussein himself in the 1990s, was the grim setting last week for the discovery of more than 3,000 graves. The people who lived there were among Hussein's Shiite targets, and they have been excavating two sites in and near the marshes looking for relatives. The marshes themselves, which were their refuge, also became, in Hussein's hands, a major environmental disaster. More...
Guardian - Duncan Campbell - 12/03/03
At the end of the first Gulf war, the marshlands of southern Iraq were drained in what was widely seen as retaliation by Saddam Hussein for the failed uprising of the Marsh Arabs, around 200,000 of whom subsequently fled the region. More...
The Marsh Arabs of Iraq: Hussein's Lesser Known Victims
USIP - 25/11/02
WASHINGTON--Saddam Hussein's persecution of his political enemies, most notably the Kurds of northern Iraq and Shia Muslims in general, is notorious in the West, except in one case: that of the "Marsh Arabs" of southern Iraq. More...
Iraqi Regime Devastates Environment of Marsh Arabs
Washington File - Jim Fuller - 24/04/02
The marshlands of southern Iraq are a unique part of the world. The region, lying between the lower reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, is where the ancient Sumerians, it is believed, became the first people to control the flow of rivers by means of dams and irrigation canals. More...
The forgotten victims of Afghanistan
Independent on Sunday - Raymond Whitaker - 06/01/2002
The Independent on Sunday's Christmas appeal for the people of Afghanistan has been an outstanding success. Readers gave more than £40,000 for the Amar International Charitable Foundation's work with displaced Afghan families in Iran and south-western Afghanistan. More...
The AMAR International Chartiable Foundation takes no responsibility for the content on the above linked sites.
AMAR International Charitable Foundation - Registered Charity no. 1047432