Al-Chibayish

The marshes around Al-Chibayish have been lived in for thousands of years, and the reed architecture of the area — arched guesthouses built from bundles of qasab reed, without nails or timber — is close to buildings shown on Sumerian carvings. Lagash, one of the great cities of Sumer, lies on the plain some 70 kilometres north-west, and the channels that fed it once ran through this landscape. The town itself grew as a settlement of the Banu Asad tribe on the Euphrates, at the point where the river enters the Central Marshes, and served as a market and administrative foothold in a region otherwise reached only by boat.

Outsiders knew little of the marshes until the 20th century, when the British traveller Wilfred Thesiger lived among their people in the 1950s and described the reed islands, buffalo herds and canoes in The Marsh Arabs. Gavin Maxwell's A Reed Shaken by the Wind came out of the same journeys. In the 1950s the marshes held an estimated 500,000 Marsh Arabs.

After the 1991 uprising against Saddam Hussein's government, the marshes were drained on a huge scale: canals and embankments carried the water away, the reed beds dried and burned, and most of their people left for the towns or for Iran. By 2003 about nine-tenths of the wetlands had been drained. Embankments were broken after 2003 and much of the water returned, and Chibayish became the centre of the recovery, with families coming back to rebuild villages. In 2016 UNESCO listed the Ahwar of Southern Iraq — the marshes together with Ur, Uruk and Eridu — as a World Heritage Site. Drought, upstream dams and rising salinity have since dried large areas again.

This is the country of the Maʻdan, the Marsh Arabs, whose life is built around water and the water buffalo. Families keep herds that are taken out to graze on reeds and brought back to island platforms at night; milk, dung fuel and the animals themselves are the household economy. Houses and guesthouses are made of cut reed, and the mudhif — a long hall of arched reed bundles with a matting roof, built for receiving guests and settling disputes — is the most striking building of the region and a matter of pride to the sheikh who raises one.

Society is tribal and Shia. Descent, marriage and the authority of a sheikh govern much of daily life, and disputes are often settled by tribal mediation rather than the courts. The mourning of Muharram is the great public occasion, marked with banners, processions and public kitchens, and Arba'een draws walkers from these villages towards Karbala.

Hospitality is close to law: a guest is taken into the guesthouse, given tea and coffee, and fed before being asked their business. Reed weaving, boat building and the poling of the mashoof are skills passed down in families, and songs and poetry of the marshes, often about water, buffalo and loss, are still sung. Many families here carry memories of displacement, and it is normal for people to talk about the years when the marsh was dry.

A few tens of thousands of people live in the town, with more in the villages and island settlements of the district around it. The day begins before dawn with milking; buffalo are then driven into the water to graze, fishermen set out in canoes, and the milk goes by boat and pickup to the collection points and on to the cities as geymar and cheese. Reeds are cut for fodder, mats and building, and in the drier parts of the district rice and wheat are grown.

The town centre carries the services the villages lack: a market, workshops, clinics, schools and the offices of the district. Government jobs, the security forces and work in Nasiriyah or Basra supplement what the marsh provides, and many families have members working away. Electricity is intermittent and generators are normal, and clean drinking water is a constant difficulty.

Water is the central issue of daily life. Reduced flows in the Tigris and Euphrates, dams upstream in Turkey, Syria and Iran, drought and salt pushing up from the Gulf have dried and salted large areas in recent years, killing buffalo and forcing families to sell herds or leave. Conservation groups and local associations based in Chibayish work on monitoring, birdlife and reed-house building, and the town has become the point of contact between the marshes and the outside world.

Marsh food is simple and comes from close at hand: fish, buffalo milk, rice, dates and bread. River carp, above all the bunni, is the staple catch, grilled beside an open fire as masgouf, fried, or simmered with tomato and dried lime. Smaller fish are salted or dried. Waterfowl were traditionally hunted in winter and still appear on tables in season.

The buffalo is the household's larder. Its milk is boiled and set into geymar, a dense clotted cream that is one of the best-known products of the south, eaten at breakfast with flat bread and dibis, the thick syrup pressed from dates; the rest becomes yoghurt, butter and a salty white cheese. Bread is baked at home on the wall of a clay tannour oven, and rice — including anbar, the fragrant variety grown along the middle Euphrates — is served with stews of okra, beans or aubergine.

Meals for guests mean quzi, lamb cooked slowly and heaped on rice with nuts and raisins, or a whole grilled fish. Tea is constant: strong, very sweet, in small waisted istikan glasses, boiled with cardamom on a fire in the guesthouse, with cardamom coffee in small cups for arrivals and departures. Dates from the groves along the river end most meals.