Basra & the South

Southern Iraq is Sumer, where the first cities grew in the fourth millennium BC. Uruk, in Muthanna province, reached tens of thousands of people and produced some of the earliest writing, and its king Gilgamesh became the hero of the world's oldest surviving epic. Ur, Eridu, Lagash and Nippur, the religious centre of Sumer, rose on the channels of the Euphrates, and under Ur-Nammu around 2100 BC Ur ruled much of Mesopotamia and built its great ziggurat. The shifting rivers and salting soil slowly emptied these cities.

The Arabs founded Basra as a garrison town in the 630s, and under the Umayyads and Abbasids it became a great port and a centre of learning: the grammarian Sibawayh, the writer al-Jahiz and the ascetic al-Hasan al-Basri all lived there, and the Sinbad tales set sail from it. The Zanj revolt of enslaved labourers in the 9th century devastated the area. Under the Ottomans Basra was a provincial capital and trading post, and British troops landed in 1914 and occupied it.

In the 20th century oil, the port and date exports made Basra rich until the Iran–Iraq War of 1980–88 put it on the front line. After the 1991 Gulf War the Shia south rose against Saddam and was crushed, and his government drained most of the marshes in the 1990s, driving out their people. After 2003 British forces were based around Basra; the marshes were partly reflooded, and in 2016 they and the ruins of Ur, Uruk and Eridu were listed together by UNESCO.

The south is overwhelmingly Shia and Arab, and tribal confederations remain powerful in the countryside, where a sheikh's guesthouse settles disputes and tribal law sits alongside the state's. The Muharram commemorations are the great public events, with processions in every town and pilgrims setting out on foot for Karbala at Arba'een.

The Marsh Arabs, the Ma'dan, have a way of life shaped by water: villages on reed islands, buffalo herding, fishing, and the mudhif, a vaulted reed guesthouse whose design goes back at least 5,000 years. Many were scattered by the draining of the marshes, and those who returned live with drought and salty water. The Mandaeans, followers of John the Baptist whose rituals require flowing water, lived for centuries in Amarah and Basra, famous as silversmiths, though most have emigrated.

Basra itself has an open, mixed character shaped by the sea trade. The poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, a pioneer of modern Arabic free verse, was born in nearby Jaykur, south of the city.

Basra is Iraq's main port and oil city. Nasiriyah, Amarah, Diwaniyah and Samawah are the other provincial capitals, each with a few hundred thousand people or fewer, and the marsh towns such as Chibayish are small.

The southern oil fields, among them Rumaila, one of the largest in the world, produce much of Iraq's oil, exported through the ports of Basra. Yet unemployment is high, power and clean water fail in the summer heat, and in 2018 contaminated water left some 30,000 people in Basra needing treatment, fuelling protests. Farming is in trouble: the palm groves along the Shatt al-Arab were cut down in the wars, salt water pushes up the river as flows shrink, and drought has dried large parts of the marshes.

Days begin early and move indoors by midday in summer, with life returning to the corniche, markets and cafés after dark. Clean water, jobs, the heat, and who controls the oil money are the questions that matter.

The south eats from its rivers, the sea and its palms. Basra is known for Gulf fish such as zubaidi (silver pomfret) and sbour (a shad), grilled or fried and served with rice, and for spiced fish stews and rice dishes that show the city's trade with India and the Gulf. Noomi Basra, dried black lime, gives many dishes their sour edge, and masgouf is grilled on the riverbanks here as in Baghdad.

The marshes supply buffalo milk, made into the rich geymar clotted cream sold across Iraq, alongside river fish and bread baked on the walls of clay tannour ovens. Rice, above all the fragrant anbar grown along the middle Euphrates, is served with every meal.

Dates are the pride of the region, grown in many varieties in the groves of Basra and along the Shatt al-Arab, once the largest date palm forest in the world. They are eaten with coffee, pressed into dibis syrup, and baked into klecha for Eid. Sweet tea in istikan glasses and cardamom coffee close every visit.

The marshes are the region's great natural wonder: the Central Marshes around Chibayish, the Hammar marsh towards Basra and the Hawizeh marsh on the Iranian border. Boat trips from Chibayish pass reed islands, buffalo herds, mudhif guesthouses and flocks of waterbirds.

Near Nasiriyah, Ur's ziggurat rises above the plain, with the royal tombs excavated by Leonard Woolley and a restored house associated by tradition with Abraham; Pope Francis visited the site in 2021. Eridu lies to the south-west, Uruk's mud-brick ruins stand in the desert of Muthanna, and Nippur lies in Qadisiyyah province, near Afak.

In Basra province, the Tigris and Euphrates meet at Qurna, where a tree marks the legendary site of Eden, and flow on as the Shatt al-Arab. In Basra the waterfront corniche has the statue of al-Sayyab, traditional shanasheel houses with wooden balconies, the Basra Museum in one of Saddam's former palaces, and palm-lined banks towards the Faw peninsula and the Gulf.