The drying out of the Mesopotamian Marshes in southern Iraq

It is 2022, the Mesopotamian Marshes in southern Iraq: the Garden of Eden is said to have once been here, the cradle of civilization, one of the largest swamp areas in the world, as big as Saxony. I get up before sunrise. We travel in narrow boats through the remaining canals until the sedge has almost completely disappeared, revealing the flames over the oil fields. The water eventually ends in dead land, baked hard by the sun like clay from a kiln.

I meet a farmer, Falah Zrair, who lives on the border between swamp and desert. He has a shaggy beard, wrinkled skin, chapped lips. His hut, cobbled together from wood and plastic sheeting, sits on a dusty knoll, perhaps two meters high, that was once a tiny island. His children are just waking up and feeding the water buffalo. The mornings here are bearable, but the temperature rises with every minute. It gets 50 degrees Celsius and more on summer days.