Iraq's marshlands: Resurrecting Eden

This story was first published Nov. 15, 2009. It was updated on June 22, 2011.

It turns out Saddam Hussein did possess a weapon of mass destruction and he used it in a slaughter that few people have heard of until now. After the Gulf War in 1991, Saddam spent untold millions on a weapon designed to exterminate an ancient civilization called the Ma'dan, also known as the "Marsh Arabs." They lived in Iraq between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, where many biblical scholars place the Garden of Eden.

But if this was the place where man fell from grace, Saddam showed just how far man can fall. In a spectacular feat of engineering he used water in a strike against his own people that not even an atom bomb could match.

Back in 2009, "60 Minutes" and correspondent Scott Pelley journeyed there with an American engineer who's resurrecting this magical land that was turned to dust by Saddam's secret weapon.

Photos: A visit to the marshes of southern Iraq
Extra: Water world
Extra: An ancient craft
Nature Iraq

"We're now officially inside the marsh. And you can see the reeds getting denser and denser, taller and taller," Azzam Alwash told Pelley, as they were heading by boat deeper into the marshland.

Alwash grew up in the water world that the Greeks named Mesopotamia, the "land between two rivers."

"I gotta tell you, this is not like any part of Iraq I've ever seen before," Pelley noted, as they boated past thick, lush and green reeds rising out of the water.

"Right? I mean, when you say Iraq, it's a desert, right? It's burning oil," Alwash said. "It's magical, is what it is. This is magic."

It has been more than 30 years since Alwash pushed through the reeds with his father, who ran the irrigation office there. In 1978, he left to study in America and became a partner in an engineering firm.

"I achieved the American dream, Scott," Alwash proudly told Pelley.

"You'd been living in the United States for 25 years. You're an American citizen. You married an American woman. Your children are as American as they can be," Pelley noted.

"And I'm as American as can be," Alwash pointed out.

"Why did you imagine going back to Iraq after the life you had built?" Pelley asked.

"I realized at some point in time that money and success and the American dream is not everything. Working on passion, on something that drives you is everything," Alwash said.

His passion is a world where Mother Nature meets Father Time: it's the cradle of civilization outlined by the Tigris and Euphrates, the likely birthplace of agriculture, the written word and the wheel.

But once the ancients set civilization on its course, the Ma'dan stayed behind.

Their villages are primitive. They weave a life out of the reeds of the marsh. They bind them into homes, feed them to their water buffalo and burn them to bake their bread.

There's not much in the way of electricity, education or health care.

But elders, like Sahi Salay, told Pelley they did just fine until 1991, when they suffered their own kind of Holocaust. That was when the U.S. and its allies invaded southern Iraq to throw Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.

The elder President Bush urged Iraqis to overthrow their dictator.

The Ma'dan and other Shiites in the south supported an uprising to topple Hussein's regime. The marshes, known for ages as a smuggler's paradise, turned out to be a perfect place for the rebels to hide, with their endless maze of waterways.

But in 1991, when the allies withdrew, the dictator turned Eden into hell.

"The United Nations Environmental Program called it the biggest engineered environmental disaster of the last century," Alwash explained.

Hussein tried to wipe out the Marsh Arabs by destroying their world. He built six canals to divert the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates out into the desert and the Persian Gulf.

Produced by Jenny Dubin

In a five-year project 90 percent of the marshes were drained - an area of more than 3,000 square miles.

"As an engineer, I'm telling you, drying of the marshes is definitely not an easy task. It's a monumental engineering project," Alwash explained. "He put every piece of equipment available in Iraq under his control at the services of the projects needed to dry the marshes."

"Saddam was using water as a weapon?" Pelley asked.

"You know, the world was looking for weapons of mass destruction. And the evidence was right under its nose," Alwash.

In the 1970s, the marshes were the Middle East's largest wetland; after the manmade drought, what was once a lush water world became a barren desert landscape.

To get a sense of the scale of the engineering project, "60 Minutes" went to have a look from above with the Illinois National Guard's 106th Aviation Wing.

From the air, we could see one of Saddam Hussein's massive canals. It was designed to capture the water, carry it past the marshes, and dump it in the Persian Gulf.

At one portion, the canal is wider than the Euphrates River itself.

"It's an unbelievable engineering achievement," Pelley remarked, looking at the vast canal system from above.

"This is my first time seeing it from the air this close up, and it is spectacular," Alwash added.

No one will ever know how many lives were lost and how many families were left in misery by the genocide that followed.

"They didn't even wait for nature to die a natural death. As soon as the embankments were finished they put light to the reeds of the marshes," Alwash said.

According to Alwash, the so-called cradle of civilization - Eden - was "dead."

Pelley met some of the survivors, like Sheikh Hassan, returning to the rubble left by Saddam Hussein's army.

"What happened to the village after everyone was ordered out? I mean, what happened to this house?" Pelley asked the sheikh.

"The government gave us three days to get out before the tanks came and crushed our houses. They destroyed about 180 houses in the area," the old man recalled.

Hassan told Pelley that many of his tribesmen were found in mass graves.

Across the region, thousands were killed and about 100,000 thousand were forced from their homes.

But then, 12 years later, when Hussein fell from power, Azzam Alwash helped launch a counterattack on the fortress of drought.

He brought in heavy earthmoving equipment, knocking a hole right through one of Saddam Hussein's massive dikes.

"I got the last laugh," Alwash told Pelley, laughing.

It was the beginning of his group "Nature Iraq," that has developed a plan to restore the marshes.

"The thing is, it was a small hole, as the water started flowing, it started digging its own passageway," Alwash said.

"So the Euphrates just pushed its way through there once you broke it?" Pelley asked.

"Yes," Alwash said. "Once you let the water go in, it just makes its own way."

Alwash's travels can be dangerous - this is still a war zone. Pelley and Alwash traveled with a security team lent by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and with a squad of Iraqi police.

Alwash wasn't sure that just re-flooding the barren earth would resurrect what was lost, but when Pelley and the "60 Minutes" team traveled deeper into the marshes, we saw what's sprung up since the waters returned in 2003: a small cluster of reed homes, surrounded by greenery and water.

All the homes are built with nothing but reeds. "Without reeds, you can't have this way of life. Reeds are the skeleton of these people's lives," Alwash said.

The house of reeds is called a "mudhif." Alwash wanted one as a meeting hall for his project, and we were there to watch the construction. It is made of nothing but reeds bound by reeds.

The arches are planted in the ground and pulled into shape. Then woven mats cover the top. Alwash's mudhif is 15 feet tall and 70 feet long. It is where we did our interview and where one of the village elders came to entertain us, singing traditional songs.

Looking at 5,000-year-old carvings, it is easy to see close similarities of the structures then and the mudhifs of today.

Near the marshes, the Sumerians erected a temple at the city of Ur, known as a ziggurat. The Sumerians thought the marshes were so important they wrote a story about them.

The story goes that the gods grew angry at man, so they sent a deluge to cover the Earth. One of the gods thought that was a terrible idea, so he warned one man to build a boat and save all the animals.

The people of this region came up with that story hundreds of years before the Old Testament gave us Noah.

The city of Ur is said to be the birthplace of Abraham, the father of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Now his descendants are returning to a life that he might have recognized.

"This cluster behind us is a cluster of about three islands built by generations, over generations. Dirt, reed, dirt, reed. Every time it settles, they add a new layer," Alwash said, explaining how the local inhabitants create and maintain their small islands hidden amongst the reeds.

"That's the Sumerian creation story, that God laid down reed mats and created man, and created the world," Pelley remarked.

"Indeed, indeed, exactly. They took it from their lives, and you know, of course the gods lived the way they do, you know, and this is Eden," Alwash said.

What is happening now is sort of a second creation story.

Thousands of Marsh Arabs have returned to this land since the re-flooding began and the Ma'dan are rebuilding their islands, with a few changes that Abraham would not have imagined - like satellite dishes.

Alwash told Pelley, "These people are restoring the marshes, not because they're tree huggers, like I am. They're restoring the marshes because they are trying to live. It's not because they love the birds flying or the reeds look nice. It's about livelihood."

We saw that when we came up on a reed market. Families were bringing their harvest to a place where the new waters spelled the end of Saddam Hussein's road.

Asked what his hope is for this place, Alwash said, "I see the marshes as a destination for eco tourism. I see the marshes as a destination for archeological tourism."

"But you know that's a very nice picture. But this is a country at war," Pelley pointed out.

" Yeah. Okay. So? The war is not gonna last forever," Alwash said. "If you're gonna dream, dream big. It's free."

Alwash is lobbying parliament to make his boyhood home Iraq's first national park. But no matter how big the dream, the marshes will never be what they once were. Upstream, as far as Turkey and Syria, there are more than 30 dams diverting water. There's a serious drought right now and oil has been discovered there - exploration will surely follow.

Still, about 50 percent of the marshes have been re-flooded. The land of civilizations past has a future again.

Since our story first aired, Alwash has been working to build an eco-tourism camp in the marshes and is planning to welcome his first visitors next March.