[Ramrod]

Are these the dams you are talking about Graham

Waters slowly return, but life may never be the same for Iraq's `Marsh Arabs'
By Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson
Knight Ridder Newspapers, June 3, 2003

"Saddam built dams to dry up the very existence of the Marsh Arabs, or Madan, who challenged his rule 12 years ago. U.S. troops recently released water from one of the dams, part of a plan by Iraqi and American wetlands experts to rehabilitate at least part of the marshes on what is now 7,000 square miles of cracked moonscape....Yet the marsh isn't the same. The water, once fresh, came back salty. The depth in May was about 5 feet, compared with 12 feet when the Americans first released the water weeks earlier. The fish that returned with the murky water were small and inedible. Former fisherman Nouri al Asadi said the fish were so bad that he was convinced the damage was permanent. "If the marshes return, so will the people, but I don't think the marshes will return," said Asadi....Today, there is no sign of marsh reeds or rivers teeming with life. What used to be marshland is made up of gray clumps of cracked earth with sparse desert vegetation broken up by dry riverbeds. The Madan say the blinding dust storms that blow across south-central Iraq are a result of this devastation. Even in Chebayish, where some green fields flourish now as a result of the recent return of water, a scramble up the banks of one of the canals the Iraqi leader built reveals a moonscape as far as the eye can see. Experts with an Iraqi expatriate organization called Eden Again are spearheading the restoration effort, funded in part by a $200,000 State Department grant. But getting enough water to restore even part of the marshes may take years, depending on the acquiescence of Iraqi farmers and oil executives, who benefited from the drainage program. Agreement also is needed from Syria and Turkey, whose dams curb the flow of water into southern Iraq