Nasiriyah

Nasiriyah is a young city in an ancient landscape. It was founded in 1872 by Nasir Pasha al-Sadun, a sheikh of the Muntafiq tribal confederation, who laid out a planned settlement on the Euphrates as a seat for his authority and a market for the tribes; the city carries his name. Ottoman administration followed, and the town grew as a trading point between the marshes, the desert grazing lands and the river route towards Basra.

The plain around it, however, had held cities for five thousand years before that. Ur, about 16 kilometres to the south-west, was a Sumerian capital under Ur-Nammu around 2100 BC; Eridu, Girsu, Larsa and Lagash lie scattered across the same flat ground. Leonard Woolley's excavations at Ur in the 1920s and 1930s, which uncovered the royal graves and their gold and lapis, made the area known far outside Iraq, and the mounds have been dug by foreign and Iraqi teams ever since.

In the 20th century Nasiriyah became the capital of Dhi Qar province and a centre of left-wing and tribal politics. It suffered in the Iran–Iraq War, joined the southern uprising after the 1991 Gulf War and was punished for it, and lost much of its hinterland when the marshes were drained in the 1990s, bringing displaced marsh families into its edges. Heavy fighting took place here during the 2003 invasion. From October 2019 the city was one of the strongest centres of the Tishreen protest movement, with long occupations of its central square over jobs, services and corruption, and it remains a byword in Iraq for protest.

Nasiriyah has a reputation within Iraq for poetry, political argument and a stubborn independence of mind. It produced or sheltered writers and communists in the middle of the 20th century, and the shaabi poetry of the south — verse in colloquial Iraqi Arabic, recited and sung — is still composed and performed here. The city's central square honours the poet Muhammad Said al-Habboubi, whose statue was raised there in 1971, and it has served ever since as the city's meeting place and the stage for its politics.

Society is Arab and overwhelmingly Shia, and tribal identity matters: the great confederations of the lower Euphrates, above all the Muntafiq, still shape families, marriages and the settling of disputes, and a sheikh's guesthouse can carry as much weight as a courtroom. The mourning rituals of Muharram dominate the public calendar, with black banners over the streets, processions, recitations and free food, and Arba'een sends walkers north towards Karbala along roads lined with volunteer kitchens.

Hospitality is close to obligatory. Guests are given tea, coffee flavoured with cardamom and whatever food is in the house, and refusing outright can offend. Dress is conservative, greetings are long, and the day is arranged around the heat: business in the morning, rest in the afternoon, and social life after dark, when the square, the riverbanks and the tea rooms fill up.

About 700,000 people live in Nasiriyah, the ninth largest city in Iraq and the administrative centre of Dhi Qar province. Its population grew quickly in the late 20th century as villagers and marsh families moved in, and much of the city is low concrete housing spread out from the older core beside the river.

Work is mostly public: provincial administration, schools, hospitals, the police and the army employ a large share of those with steady jobs, alongside shopkeeping, transport, building work and farming in the irrigated land nearby. The province has oil fields, but they employ relatively few people directly, and the gap between provincial oil revenue and local unemployment is a standing grievance — one of the reasons the city became the centre of the 2019 protests. Many young people look for work in Basra or Baghdad, or abroad.

Daily life turns on water and electricity. Summer temperatures near 50°C make power cuts serious, and generators, some shared by a whole street, run through the afternoon. The Euphrates arrives here after long use upstream, and falling flows, salt and drought have hurt farming and the marshes alike, pushing more marsh families into the city. Mornings begin early in the markets, the middle of the day empties the streets, and the evening belongs to the riverfront, the square and the tea houses.

The Euphrates sets the menu. Masgouf, carp split open and roasted upright beside a wood fire before being laid over the embers, is the dish of the riverbank, eaten with flatbread, raw onion, lemon and amba, a tart mango pickle. Other river fish are fried or stewed, and further towards the marshes the catch includes bunni and other carp-family fish that are the mainstay of marsh households.

Everyday food is southern Iraqi: quzi, lamb cooked until it falls apart and heaped on rice with almonds and raisins; timman bagilla, rice with broad beans and dill; kubba, shells of bulgur or rice stuffed with spiced meat, fried or dropped into soup; dolma, vegetables and vine leaves stuffed and cooked in a sour sauce; and thick stews of okra, white beans or aubergine served over rice. Noomi Basra, dried black lime, gives many of these their sour edge, and bread is baked on the inside wall of a clay tannour oven, often at home.

Dates are the pride of the province, sold fresh at the end of summer and dried the rest of the year, pressed into dibis syrup that is eaten with tahini, and baked into klecha, the stuffed biscuits made for Eid. The marshes supply buffalo milk, which becomes geymar, a thick clotted cream spread on bread with date syrup for breakfast. Tea is drunk very sweet from small waisted istikan glasses at every hour, and cardamom coffee is served to guests.