Wounded Tigris: A River Journey through the Cradle of Civilization by Leon McCarron, Corsair, 2023. Pp 346. HB £15

The Arabs of Iraq’s marshlands have lived in the wetlands for over 5,000 years. This earliest and continuously inhabited region is said to be the biblical Garden of Eden. It has witnessed some of the most vicious and egregious violence ever perpetrated on an ancient population.

It is an area that seasonally spans between 8,000 and 20,000 square kilometres at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The Arabs of the marshes and other diverse peoples traditionally lived off the land and the rivers, fishing, water buffalo breeding, cultivation, and cane reed crafting.

In the prologue to ‘Wounded Tigris: A River Journey through the Cradle of Civilization,’ Leon McCarron observes: “The miracle of Mesopotamia begins deep in the great sweep of peaks and lakes that form the eastern Taurus range, beneath an unremarkable mountain called Korha.

There, in a narrow, steep-sided canyon, a rough stream tumbled along…. this the Assyrians decided three millennia ago was the source of the Tigris. Close by rises the Euphrates, and, to the south, an otherwise arid and resource-poor floodplain is transformed. Now we call that area the Cradle of Civilization, where the birth of the city-state led to the invention of the wheel and the written word.

To that list of firsts, we could also add codified legal systems, schools, sailing boats, beer brewing, and love songs.” Archaeologists and historians believe that the marshes saw the world’s first successful irrigation efforts to grow crops. The oldest known city in the world, Ur, was at the edge of the marshes, near the present city of Nasariyah.

While a major municipal project in 1953 almost drained the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, it was Saddam Hussein, who accused the region’s inhabitants of treachery during the 1980-1988 war with Iran, that dammed and drained the marshes in the 1990s to flush out anti-regime rebels seeking refuge in the marshes.

Almost 200,000 Arabs fled their marsh homes as Saddam bombed the villages, laid land, and water mines, and arrested and executed thousands of people. Not only was their environment destroyed, creating food shortages, health crises, widespread misery, and death, but the Indigenous population was also subjected to Saddam’s notorious chemical attacks.

By 1993, the Baathist government had diverted much of the Tigris and Euphrates, thus preventing the waters from flowing into the marshlands.

The reason given by the government was that it wanted to create new agricultural lands, however, residual salinization had already destroyed the land. The vast majority of those living in the marshlands had to leave and thousands took refuge in other parts of Iraq, with more than 40,000 crossing into Iran. While thousands still live there in refugee camps, a few thousand have returned to their ancestral homes.

In 2021, broadcaster, writer, and adventurer McCarron travelled across Turkey, Syria, and into the heartland of Iraq, seeking the source of the Tigris River. Setting off by boat, he journeyed the entire length of this majestic river.

Wounded Tigris is more than an adventurer’s travelogue. It is the biography of a living, breathing, and almost dying waterway that for centuries sustained the Arabs of the marshes. It routed traders and transported travellers along the length of these ancient channels.

Through a keen eye and sensitive disposition, McCarron captures the history of the present inhabitants of the marshes, in the headwaters created by the two great rivers. He brings to life their cultures, traditions, hopes, and fears in an enduring civilization built upon the vastness of the colossal river.

“For thousands of years, the Tigris and Euphrates have acted as a lung, breathing life into what the Greeks called Mesopotamia, or ‘the Land Between Two Rivers’”, writes McCarron.

The Arabs of the marshes have a unique culture that the world has not fully understood, acknowledged, or appreciated. For centuries, they have harnessed the rich riparian environment, intermittently interrupted by the avarice of kings, tyrants, and dictators, as well as the unbridled hubris and arrogance of invading armies.

In an anguished lament, McCarron decries what has become of the great river: “The rivers and their tributaries have become clogged, erratic. Upstream countries are building dams to control the flow of the life source. A changing climate has brought environmental instability to countries already burdened with other tensions….in the marshes, I saw Edenic waters polluted and poisoned.”

“But what would it mean for humanity to lose one of the great rivers of civilization?” asks McCarron. In answering that question, he has provided an inescapable truth: humanity stands on the precipice of a major historical, intellectual, cultural, spiritual, and civilizational catastrophe.

Wounded Tigris bears witness to humanity’s inextricable link to nature. It is a tribute and testimony to one of the greatest alliances bound by a delicate balance between man and nature.

Mahomed Faizal