If the construction of Ilisu is completed as planned, there will be devastating consequences upwards of 1,000 kilometers downstream of the dam. The dam will hold back the water that the marshes and their inhabitants need desperately, especially the spring floods that feed the flood plains near Basra. Whatever water makes it to the marshes will be reduced to a dirty trickle. Over the years of debate about Ilisu, the consequences for this area were ignored. This changes now.
The Marsh Arabs are the inhabitants of the most important cultural landscape in the world, the Mesopotamian marshes in southern Iraq. At the confluence of the Euphrates and Tigris, the Sumerians developed the first writing, the first laws and the principles of ou ragriculture over 6,000 years ago. This area must have been the Garden of Eden. Abraham, the father of Judaism, Christianity and Islam may have been born in the nearby city of Ur. Despite numerous interventions, an irreplacable landscape in which people live as as they have for time out of memory: sleeping in reed houses, fishing, hunting, and raising water buffalo.
"We are people of Mesopotamia, we are connected across the Tigris. This river is our common roots, our lifeblood and our future. We will fight together," said Sheik Sayed Abbas. He concluded with a simple suggestion:"If we reduced the height of the dam from 130 meters to 65meters, this would not flood Hasankeyf, and our marshes would not dryout." - 65 meters for the cradle of humanity. Is this too muchto ask?
