Militarized ecologies in Iraq’s marshlands: the endless war and/or a system build on sand?

, by JASIM Ansar

The Iraqi marshland region was declared UNESCO world heritage, but still the population suffers from the extractivist activities of oil companies and a militarization of their area. The indigenous population resists, and so should we with them.

Introduction

“Aro water” – as people call it- is the water filter system used in Iraq that cleans through so called “reverse osmosis” (RO) and hereby turns tap water to drinkable water. Initially this technic was developed by the military and used by the NASA. This technic for water sanitation is used in Iraq since 2003. As the water infrastructure in all of Iraq, and especially in the cities, was seriously harmed by the wars of the USA – especially the war of 1991 targeted the infrastructure of the country – the aro water is now sold in mobile tanks on vans transported through the villages and cities. In order for people to know that the van is approaching, a song is played. All over Iraq, it is the same song. It is a melody in a deep tone like a flute – rather than suggesting the possibilities that come with water, hope and life, the song alludes to the insufficient provision with this resource of life. These mobile tanks are private operators. Be it in Baghdad or in the South-Eastern villages of the province of Amara, the tone reaches every alley. However, the tune not only stands for a war inducted infrastructure, in the marshlands of Amara, it is a byword for the continued, endless war against the people living here.

This article talks about an endless war, in order to bring the violence to light that often remains unrecognized: in everyday experiences, material aspects but also an affective nature. This violence has altered the way people live – this is what the Iraqi-American anthropologist Kali Rubaii calls “less than lethal” violence. [1] The story of the Iraqi marshlands shows that the accumulation of this violence, inevitably leads to death – not of single people, not even of a single eco-system, but to a whole non-commodified way of living. While this endless war was set in motion by pre-capitalist greed for accumulation,[ https://ahwari.net/environments-extraction-and-resistance]][ it was continued through the British colonial powers, the imperial power of the USA and by the Iraqi nation state itself. The marshlands tell the story of the fraternization of militarization and capitalism.

The ruination of the Ahwar

Hor (pl. Ahwar) are the marshland regions that spread from Southeast Iraq to South Western Iran created through and in the floodplains of the two rivers, Euphrates and Tigris. The hor is a flooded grassland that consists of reed beds, permanent lakes and a network of water distributaries with a wide variety of flora and fauna. The marshes are also a stopover for bird populations. The marshes spread through once connected rivers trough three provinces of Iraq´s South, Amara, Nasriya and Basra. People in this region used to live from fishing, agriculture – especially rice- buffalo breeding. Buffalo would provide milk for yogurt and cheese making. Their dwelling and transportation culture is heavily reliant on water: the houses are built on islands of old reed, and they used to move by the mashhouf – long wooden boats. A hundred years ago, when this eco-system was still intact, one could reach the harbor city of Basra, which lies around 180 km south by boat. Today, one needs to take the car – using fossil fuels like benzin.

"Did you ever see a water buffalo drinking RO water?", 21 year old Jamal asks. Only three years ago, they used to have 20 buffalos, today they only have 10 left. The buffalos have names. This recognizes their labor in sustaining the livelihoods of the people and has an affective dimension, they are considered family members.

The water scarcity heavily affects them. Standing in front of the house, which is elevated over the area around one meter, Nassima, Jamal´s mother, looks over the wide land of thorny bushes. All of this used to be covered by water. "Come here, I show you something" she takes me around the corner. She opens the water tank that is used for the everyday activities like dish washing or laundry. It is still, it stinks, it´s brown with some insects. The water is directly pumped from the only channel a few meters away. But no water is left there. The only water that gets assembled there is sewage, rain water and occasionally the "hussa", the governmental share that the authorities are supposed to let throw the channels.

Crédit : ©Ali Rahima.

While they can buy water for drinking for the buffalos and themselves, there is now no space for the animals to acclimate their bodies. They are water animals, not made to be outside. Buying Aro water comes at its costs: 5 tones cost 15000 Iraqi Dinars, around 10 Dollars. A lot of money for families of 10 persons and more with often only one bread winner who hardly earns more than 20,000 IQD a day. But the buffalo is central in the reproduction of Ahwari life and culture.

Their house is at the margin of their almost abandoned village. Only 500 meters from their house are some water puddles left. To go there, they have to get a permission from the security checkpoint that is less than 50 meters from their house by beeline. But to go there, they need to cross the dried out river bed. A barrier covers the dried out river bed. While this combination of plastic wrapped with barbed wire looks primitive, it is part of a broader security infrastructure.

Militarization and a resilient checkpoint

This checkpoint is not just the remnants of a security infrastructure built up there in the 1980s. It rather is the expression of the development of security in an area that has been heavily militarized in the last 40 years. It brings together the two objectives with one underlying logic.

This security infrastructure was once put in order to control the area during the Iran-Iraq war between 1980 and 1988. During that time within the euphemistically labeled “Operation Peace” the marsh population from 1983 on was forcefully deported, many detained and killed for the sake of national security justified by the racist logic that the Marsh people are infiltrators supporting the “enemy state” of Iran.

Already before, the marsh region was the imaginary of a resisting Iraq. Ahmad Khaled Zaki in 1968 went there to organize an armed resistance against the central state after the Arab nationalist Ba´th party came to power. [2] He and other movements saw the Ahwar as an ecology of resistance.

Later, during the 1991 war, right after Saddam Hussain ordered his army to attack Kuwait and a US-led alliance set out to attack Iraq and set for a war targeting its infrastructure, people in Kurdistan-Iraq, the South of Iraq and the Ahwar rose up against Saddam Hussain. The marshes were good for hiding. So Saddam dried them out. Interestingly, while he was building new dams, he also used plans and an infrastructure that was developed by the British colonial forces who had their own plans in the 1920s for exploiting the area. [3]

Saddam Hussain developed the security infrastructure further. Military roads, military and police barracks were spread throughout the area. It is around this time that the respective checkpoint, mentioned above, was put next to Jamal´s house, who wasn´t yet born at time, his mother and father being still young.

Then the war of 2003 happened. The Iraqi army moved out of the checkpoint and the US army moves in for the next 8 years. Around that time, Jamal was born. He grew up with the garbage dump of the military base next to his house. The children play there, the buffalos eat. Not knowing that the garbage dumps of the military are amongst the most poisonous, the buffalo of his neighbor died. [4]

Today, this infrastructure serves the security of the near by oil companies that are extracting oil from the dried out marshland. Here, in the so called Hawazeh Marshland, the third biggest oil reserve of the world is located. The area behind the checkpoint and in the dried hor around Nassima´s house is covered with security infrared cameras every five hundred meters. In order to get the permission to cross the checkpoint into the parts of the hor that are covered with water, the inhabitants have to renew their Ahwar residency card every six months. Then they still have to ask for permission to cross into the area. “Last time, my father was allowed to go there with the buffalos for only 2 hours. He was late 20 min. When he came back, they interrogated him about the delay. Before he could even answer, they showed him the footage from the security cameras.” Through this infrastructure they could surveille the buffalo breeder in every step he did. They intimidated him that next time he might not get the permission to cross. The government claims this is because of their war against drugs. People in the area know that these are only excuses.

Crédit : ©Ali Rahima.

Be it the Iran-Iraq war, the counter-insurgency, the US army or the war on drugs, the lives of the people in Ahwar are framed as dispensable for the “greater good of the nation”.

The militarization of the area is engrained through three related layers. The first layer is the way land is awarded to the oil companies: in Iraq, many political parties have militias who are involved in economic activity. Such an activity would be the brokerage of land to oil production companies. Another layer is the private security of the companies which are often from Baghdad. However, this offers only minor security to the companies. Due to the local social composition, tribes who were re-empowered through the political system of Saddam Hussain, are a factor to be taken into account. One of the economic activities of the tribes is the extortion of money of anyone trying to pass through their territory of influence. On the other hand, it is exactly this infrastructure that the companies use as a third layer of their security complex. They directly engage with them through so called “atawa”, which is a form of “protection money”. Additionally, members of the tribe work in the company´s security section and move with the mobile structure of the oil production infrastructure (the mobile drill), hereby signifying to other tribes that this oil firm is “already taken”.

There is an organic relationship then between the parastatal role of the tribes in this area and the oil firms. First the British colonial power in Iraq strengthened the role of the tribes in order to weaken the position of the urban bourgeoisie. They distributed land to them and through this, they established a hierarchical structure within the tribes, where the sheikh had the new function of being the political and economic leader of the tribe. This function became redundant with the expropriation of the land and redistribution to all small scale farmers after the toppling of the British backed monarchy in 1958. It was in the 1990s, when Saddam Hussain reestablished the Sheikhs as powerful tool of his regime to penetrate especially rural societies by providing them with money and weapons. After the regime change of 2003, the political parties continued to provide the Sheikhs with important resources in their hope for exchange of political allegiance. Hence, today, when analyzing the role of the tribes in the security infrastructure of the oil companies, they should not be read as a non-state actor, but rather as an actor that fulfills a parastatal function. As the tribes are heavily armed today, they form part and parcel of the infrastructure of control of society of the state. This goes beyond a simple understanding of militarization for the means of military aims, this is part of population control in the area and of the extractivist politics harming especially the local society.

National and multinational exploitation, from colonialism to capitalism

Ahwar suffers from heavy extractivism. The world bank frames Iraq to be “one of the most oil‑dependent countries in the world. Over the last decade, oil revenues have accounted for more than 99% of exports, 85% of the government’s budget, and 42% of gross domestic product (GDP)”. [5] While indeed the Iraqi political and economic system relies on the revenues from oil, it is multinational companies that benefit from Iraq´s oil. To say Iraq is oil dependent, veils the colonial legacy of oil production in the area. [6]

To cut it short: the ruins of the ahwar are “war ecologies” which “refers to a legacy of imperial subjugation that has for centuries diminished human bodies by controlling their engagement with land, water, and sky”. [7]

Crédit : ©Ali Rahima.

The ruination of the Ahwar did not start three years ago. While it had always been a resource wealthy place for the central government to exploit like during and before Ottoman times (1534–1920), in pre-colonial times, those resources were not extracted in a capitalist sense. But in a capitalist mode of production “[w]ithin the international division of labor, extractivism is the mechanism that links the exploitation of resources and raw materials in the periphery—with all its damaging consequences for the lives of […] workers, their communities, and the environment—” [8] to our mode of living that relies on these resources.

Part of this mode is to leave the local population outside the knowledge of what is going on. While we were brainstorming on a campaign to stop the expansion of the next oil field, Jamal says: “My grandfather told me how the Americans – but I think they were British- came in the 1920s or 30s. They paid him to remove the qasab (reed) from their way, so that they could do the drilling in the marshes in their search for oil”. Indeed, before the British empire came with its army to occupy Iraq in the wake of the “distribution” of land from the Ottoman empire, they came to survey the land for oil. For this purpose, they founded already in 1912 the Turkish Petroleum Company (TPC). After having gained control over Iraq in 1918, by 1930, the TPC was merged into a consortium made up of BP, Total Shell and other American companies under the name Iraqi Petroleum Company. In 1932 Iraq formally became independent, while in fact British consultants were part of the ministries and even parliament. Hence, no wonder that in 1938 the IPC gained the concessions for extracting all the so far discovered oil in Iraq for the next 75 years. Soon more fields were discovered and opened. Already from 1952 on, gas flaring was used for oil production. While the Iraqi government repeatedly demanded for the use of a technique that allows the use of the gas, it would only be applied in production when the oil industry became nationalized in 1972. Indeed, gas flaring was reduced by 95% by the 1990s. But the war of 1991, which heavily affected all infrastructure, did not spare the capacities of the oil industry. [9] While after 2003 the oil industry was not only privatized, new oil concessions for foreign companies were negotiated- this time again while the country was still officially occupied by the Anglo-British alliance. It is in this context that the companies created a law-less parallel world: in what they called “stabilization clauses” they got impunity by law from any punishment concerning environmental harm caused by their activities. [10]

The political system and heterotopia

The Iraqi political system is called “muhassasa Ta´ifiya” a sectarian quota sharing system which is an exclusive elite pact that distributes the state revenues between the ruling parties. This post-2003 system works the following way as political scientist Toby Dodge explains:

“the Muhasasa system has dictated that ministries and their resources were awarded to the ethno-sectarian parties in governments of national unity. Each party has used its ministers to exploit government resources. They expand government payrolls to employ their members and followers. As a result, access to government employment, dominant in the Iraqi job market, is only guaranteed by pledging alliance to one of the political parties promoting the Muhasasa system. Iraqis seeking government jobs are interpolated as members of exclusive ethno-sectarian communities, Sunni, Shi’a or Kurd.” [11]

As the number of state employed people rose from 850,000 in 2004 to 7-9 million in 2016, [12] one can understand how the parties buy allegiance. Also, the paramilitary para-statal militias are financed through this system while also having their own economic and political activities. This reality is the result of the dismantling of the security infrastructure in Iraq after the invasion and occupation of Iraq through the USA. The dissolving of the army and other institutions created a vacuum that was filled. There is a paradox relation between the state and these paramilitary actors: “[their] autonomy thrives on state weakness, yet it weakens state institutions further the more it expands”. [13] One of the militias that was active in the fight against the IS later also formed an electoral bloc and managed to be represented in parliament, gaining further access to state resources for its financing. The very same militia was involved in the suppressing of protesters during the October 2019 protests, many of them taking place also in the Ahwar region. As 90% of the state revenues come from oil, it is this system that is financed through the oil revenues and it is this system that is afraid not to deliver to its followers if the oil price sinks – which means more production is needed- or if the oil production could be disrupted. This is why in the eyes of the political elite and in the public discourse the Ahwari lives are dispensable. So say it blankly: their death guarantees the existence of the political system.

Internal resistance and the struggle for the narrative

Part of resistance starts with the ability to self-definition – determining yourself who you are. There is a new generation that grew up in the Ahwar region or in the areas of displacement who defines themselves as Ahwari (Pl. Ahwariyin) with the clear notion of indigeneity to the ahwari land. Here, being Ahwari comes with general claims of protection of land for an indigenous way of living and for future generations. The discourse of the groups claiming this identity notion is also internationalist, it connects to indigenous struggles in the neighboring Iran or Palestine.

It has a clear anti-extractivist discourse. There are different positions in the community on which demands to raise vis-à-vis the oil companies and the state. While parts of the community has lost any hope that the dominant forces will respect their rights and therefore just demand compensation, the Ahwariyin say that there cannot be any suitable reward: indigenous land with the lifestyle and the livelihood it provides for people cannot be compensated. Hence, from these most exploited margins, a new discourse of social justice is arising that might be also inspiring for the Left in Iraq. They are at the frontline of de-normalizing the capitalist mode of being in Iraq.

However, the landscape is militarized and securitized. When a group of Ahwariyin made community meetings to discuss their approach to the new oil field with the local notables, they continued to receive calls from the “National Security Service”, the domestic secret service. Since 2011 and throughout three consecutive Iraqi governments, it has been controlled by Falih Al-Fayyadh, who was involved in the violent suppression of Iraqi protesters during the popular uprising 2019. This agency is directly linked to the prime minister´s office. Falih Al-Fayyadh fulfills here a double-role: he was also the head of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), a militia that was founded in 2014 in order to fight against Daesh (Arabic acronym for ISIS). However, the militia was not dissolved but integrated into the state´s budget while still operating independently from the state armed structures. However, the head of the PMF has been no other than Falih Al-Fayyadh himself. Hence, the suppressive capacity of the militarized structures in Iraq feeds itself from state resources and acts within and outside its structures.

The Ahwariyin are not recognized as Human Rights Defenders by the international human rights community, although their lives are in a constant threat. The NGOs working in the area approach the topic of the Ahwar almost entirely through a climate change discourse.

The normalizing discourse of “social corporate responsibility” which demands that the oil companies and the Iraqi state shall invest in the areas of oil exploitation, is multi-layered in Iraq. On the one hand, especially currently, people in parts of the Ahwar had to fight with water scarcity for the last three years. In Jamals´s village, only three families are left. Part of the discourse is around the provision with work in the oil fields for the Ahwariyin. This discourse however only works if people accept that water will not come back to the area ever again. Indeed, Ahwariyin work in the oil companies as low skilled laborers. In a manner that reminds of colonial times, they work as “boys” of the engineers coming from abroad (Western states, but also China). Often local sheikhs exploit the desperation and hopelessness of the local population and convince them to sell their land to them, which they then sell to the oil companies. The oil company in return largely relies on the (economic) infrastructure that those local notables can provide them: security, procurement for cheap labor and construction material. Most of the time, they don´t even ask for the companies to fulfill their “social corporate responsibility” which would demand that they invest in the local infrastructure. Almost like in early capitalist times, the only roads that are asphalted are those leading to the company complexes and compounds.

Many individuals in Ahwar document on the situation, filming when they go to the remaining Hor, filming where the water reached and where not. The government not only defames them, but also heavily surveilles their social media accounts. Those activities are skeptical of NGOs trying to take over their demands and make them docile, as they perceive it. For the Ahwar, Rosa-Luxemburg´s words remain very true: “the most revolutionary act is and remains to say things as they truly are”. [14]

What is needed is that the social movements that arose in Iraq in 2019, and that started to formulate a broader social-economic vision for Iraq, learn from the communities at the margins and take this as a starting point for a utopian socially just world that they can claim for themselves. In 2019, at the height of the anti-system protests, activists drew a huge graffiti in Baghdad´s Tahrir Square that displayed an oil company in the shape of a hand that read “fuck you. Here is your oil”. [15] At the same time in 2019, also in the Ahwar region people got mobilized. Both movements have to come together and formulate a vision that goes beyond the question of how to distribute the extractivist state revenues (that are generated to 90% from oil). But rather places the vision of social justice at the center as formulated by the Ahwariyin.

"Here is your oil", Bagdad, 2019.
Crédit : ©Ali Rahima.

Prolog

As of the time of writing, the measurements for the next oil field- paradoxically called “Hor al-Huwaizah” oil field - started. Stones of the size of 50 cm are let into the ground with letters and numbers. If this field is opened, there will be no way back.

Activists document that on social media. The government ridiculously remains claiming that the new oil field is outside the marshland area. One Sheikh with considerable influence, who was quoted above, and who we met during the community talks, had pledged to keep the Ahwari activists safe, suddenly he withdrew from his promise. It turns out that he sold parts of his land to the oil company. If money speaks, it seems that for some suddenly the air becomes enough to be shared with the oil companies.

This article described the perpetual war against the Ahwar region. These are dark times. The Iraqi government appears as the willful execution of imperialist interests. In this view, indigenous cultures in a capitalist-militarized world are seen as a threat as they not only pose an alternative to extractivist ways of living, but their existence is really “inconvenient” as they geographically inhabit the area that is supposed to be commodified and exploited. Hence the weaponization of ecosystems and their alterization is a common tool in the area: the Turkish government for example has deliberately burned forests in order to force restive Kurds to assimilate “to a modern way of life”. Also Israel alters the ecosystem in the Westbank while at the same time wanting to integrate Palestinian labor and land into the globalized Israeli economy. [16]

After Saddam Hussain had drained the Ahwar region in the 90s, once the war started in 2003, the people of Ahwar went to the dams that prevented the water from reaching the marshes and destroyed them with their own hands. They did not wait for anyone to liberate them, especially not the US tanks. [17]

The global greed for oil is a transnational issue and demands an internationalist answer and solidarity response. Let us show in Rosa-Luxemburg´s words that “[their] `order´ is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will “raise its head again” and, to [their] horror, proclaim with the sound of a trumpet: I was, I am, I will be!”