The engineer who built a wall across the Euphrates to bring back the water

Jassim Al-Asadi was born in the marshes of southern Iraq and has spent more than twenty years trying to refill them. In Chibayish, his team has thrown an earthen embankment across the Euphrates and cut a canal to divert drainage water into the dying Western Al-Hammar Marsh. Flooded marshland has risen to 32–36 percent, up from as little as 8 percent in the worst drought years.

Jassim Al-Asadi trained as an irrigation engineer and spent most of his working life inside Iraq's Ministry of Water Resources — the same institution whose canals helped empty the place he came from. In 1992 the Main Outfall Drain was completed, a 565-kilometre channel known as the Third River, built to carry saline runoff from the Mesopotamian plain past the marshes to the Gulf. That same year the large-scale drainage began. Saddam Hussein's government emptied the wetlands to flush out Shia rebels sheltering in the reeds, and with the water went the people: the Ma'dan, who numbered around half a million in the 1950s, are now estimated by the UN at as few as 20,000 in Iraq.

Al-Asadi joined his first restoration project in 2006 and moved to Nature Iraq in 2011, the organisation founded in 2004 by Azzam Alwash, a civil engineer who had run a practice in California before returning after 2003. Al-Asadi now directs it. The work is unglamorous and continuous: weekly water-quality monitoring at the marsh's inlet and outlet points, training for local institutions in environmental management, and engineering of the kind that can be measured in centimetres of water depth.

Since the drainage water reached Western Al-Hammar, the return has been visible. Birds. Fish species. Aquatic vegetation thick enough to feed the water buffalo herds that came back with their owners. Families who had left returned to fishing, to buffalo herding, to weaving reed mats from the qasab that grows again in the shallows.

None of this has been safe work. In February 2023 an armed group seized Al-Asadi on the road near Baghdad. He was held for two weeks and later said he had been beaten and given electric shocks. He was released on 15 February and went back to the marshes. The following year he published The Ghosts of Iraq's Marshes, written with the geographer Steve Lonergan.

A drain built to carry water past the marshes now carries it into them.

The larger arithmetic remains against him. Water in the marshes depends on what upstream neighbours release, and Iraq's stored water fell by close to half in 2025, the lowest in roughly eighty years. Heavier rain and larger inflows in spring 2026 added some six billion cubic metres back to the reserves — a reprieve, not a reversal. Four of these wetlands, including East and West Hammar, carry UNESCO World Heritage status, inscribed in 2016 alongside the ruins of Ur and Uruk. The Ma'dan build their mudhif guest halls from bundled reed alone, no nails, no timber, in a form that matches structures carved on Sumerian artefacts five thousand years ago.

Al-Asadi is building an embankment to keep that going a little longer.